Tiny - let's make a correction here. I don't think I wrote that of the total population affected by wuhan Virus infection, that 90% were asymptomatic.
Originally Posted by oeb11
Oeb, I said
over 90%. I'm not sure what % you and Ioannidis would think is asymptomatic, but thought it would be a lot more than 90%. You can see this in much of what Ioannidis has written on Covid-19. For example, he was a co-author of this:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1....14.20062463v2
The paper estimates that 54X more people had been infected in Santa Clara, California than were counted as confirmed cases.
I don't think the paper is worth your time to read, as it has received a lot criticism from the scientific community. Among other things, the antibody test would have generated a good number of false positives. Also, they recruited off Facebook. The reasoning goes that if you think you had Covid-19, you would have been a lot more likely to volunteer to get the antibody test.
I may be imagining things, but I thought you were guessing the number of Americans infected by Covid-19 earlier on in the crisis was around 20%, which, like Ioannidis' study, might imply a large number of people were asymptomatic. (Right now, the 3.78 million confirmed cases we've got only represents 1.2% of the population.)
I didn't realize that you and Ioannidis might believe that a large number of people who have the disease but aren't confirmed cases actually have had symptoms. That is, they weren't all asymptomatic, many just never got tested. My bad.
I don't think it's unreasonable however to believe that for every confirmed case, there are ten people walking around with Covid 19 that haven't been tested. This is actually what the CDC said two or three weeks ago. Some of those people will isolate at home. I hope the others, symptomatic and asymptomatic, are using masks.
I agree with you about the infection fatality rate declining, which is a good thing.