I think you’re right, I was just mistaken in assuming that Singapore tested everyone rather than only people with symptoms. However WHO has reported that 75% of asymptomatic cases detected in China develop symptoms later, so asymptomatic cases seemingly won’t reduce the global fatality rate much.
Seems possible but I don’t really understand where China’s claims about asymptomatic cases are coming from so I’ve been hesitant about putting too much weight on them. Copying some thoughts on this over from a FB comment I wrote (apologies that some of it doesn’t make total sense w/o context).
tl;dr I’m pretty unsure whether China actually has so few minimally symptomatic/asymptomatic cases.
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Those 320,000 people were at fever clinics, so I think none of them should be asymptomatic.
The report does say “Asymptomatic infection has been reported, but the majority of the relatively rare cases who are asymptomatic on the date of identification/report went on to develop disease. The proportion of truly asymptomatic infections is unclear but appears to be relatively rare and does not appear to be a major driver of transmission.”
But from a quick skim, I don’t think the basis for that finding is mentioned anywhere in the report. My guess is that Chinese officials told them that there were very few asymptomatic cases among people who were tested through contact tracing (which theoretically should test cases whether or not they’re symptomatic.
I haven’t really read anything from experts on this but my speculative guess is that we shouldn’t rely too heavily on claims about data from China’s contact tracing. The report claims that 100% of contacts were successfully traced in Shenzen and Guangdong and 99% in Sichuan. “100%” is a bit of a red flag coming from that regime.
I think you’re right, I was just mistaken in assuming that Singapore tested everyone rather than only people with symptoms. However WHO has reported that 75% of asymptomatic cases detected in China develop symptoms later, so asymptomatic cases seemingly won’t reduce the global fatality rate much.
Seems possible but I don’t really understand where China’s claims about asymptomatic cases are coming from so I’ve been hesitant about putting too much weight on them. Copying some thoughts on this over from a FB comment I wrote (apologies that some of it doesn’t make total sense w/o context).
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1073098183053785&id=100010608396052&comment_id=1073152789714991&reply_comment_id=1073889599641310