On asymptomatic spread.
El gato malo writes about it at his new Substack page, bad cattitude
this “invisible dragon” is mostly a mythical beast.
tl;dr:
The overwhelming majority of scientific research before 2020 about the efficacy of masking, social distancing, stay-at-home orders, occupancy restrictions, business closures, school closures and other “NPIs” directed at restricting the daily movements-of and contacts-between healthy people during any infectious-disease outbreak, found vanishingly minimal infection-control benefits and large individual and societal harms.
And the vast majority of scientific research specific to Covid, available by April 2020 and bolstered consistently thereafter as more data became available, found the same thing.
Specifically, even within a household in which one person shows symptoms, the “secondary attack rate” was 18%. Less than one in five people sharing meals, kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms and other common spaces within a shared dwelling would catch Covid from the symptomatic person.
For spouses sharing a bedroom and a bed, the secondary attack rate was 37.8%. So, even with daily contact in common spaces, and then highly intimate contact at night, sleeping and sex-having together, six in 10 spouses would not catch Covid from a symptomatic partner.
The secondary attack rate for people within a household, in which one person tested positive for Covid but had no symptoms, was 0.7%. Less than 1%.
The policy recommendations that are supported by that data are “stay home if you feel sick and try to isolate yourself from other people.”
Not “stay home even if you feel fine, don’t go to work, don’t go to school, wear a mask anytime you go anywhere other than your own house, and stay six or more feet away from any other human you might encounter.”
Again, this was all known — generally and specific to Covid — by April 2020. The April through December data sets were compiled, analyzed and published in JAMA in December 2020, with the lede buried.
In other words, despite this “Data” and the “Science,” the large personal and societal harms on healthy people were inflicted anyway, for no infection-control benefits, by cowardly and corrupt politicians, school boards, scientists and bureaucrats, for nothing more noble than their own power and paychecks.
And — because there are currently no effective checks on the power of the executive-class sociopaths through legislatures, courts, media, or voters — the sociopaths are still in power in April 2021, still inflicting those harms, and attempting to extend and expand them.
