people not showing symptoms (yet) tending towards being more highly infectious (Fig 1A), and
age having little to do with how infectious a person can be while not showing symptoms.
This supports the observations made here about younger people being effective spreaders of COVID-19, despite not actually dropping dead as often, and would support the observation that school re-openings seem to lead waves of the disease.
Time to write my Member of Provincial Parliament again… Ontario is looking for a “consensus” on opening schools for the last month of the school year.
Oh, the conspiracy theorists and GQP will have a field day with this. It would be good to know, and there is circumstantial things that make one question, but this will blow up in our faces.
Yes they will, and that’s partly due to the fact that so many people completely dismissed the very idea of an accidental lab leak as being a crazy conspiracy theory on par with “China intentionality developed a bio-weapon and released it on the world to hurt Trump.” Obviously no conspiracy would be required for an accidental leak to occur.
And some businesses complain that a $300-a-week federal unemployment benefit, provided in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue package, has meant that many unemployed people can receive more income from unemployment aid than from their former jobs.
Oh, geez. Did they ever stop to think they’re not paying enough?
Generally speaking, I understand it like this: people with higher viral loads tend to be more infectious, peak viral load is one to three days before onset of symptoms, and all age groups are about equal in their viral loads.
I ask everyone not to use the term “asymptomatic” in this context. Medically, asymptomatic carriers do not develop symptoms. However, this fucker of a virus spreads before you can even get symptoms.
By the way, patients with higher peak viral loads apparently are more likely to develop strong symptoms, and to need hospital treatment.
(Just FTR, while this sounds as if everyone should have known: we did not. And this isn’t necessarily the case with all virus types.)
But not all age groups are equal in their eagerness to share their secretions. Toddlers and preschoolers are notorious snot sharers, and ever shall be. Given the same viral load, a given toddler is (probably) many times more infectious than any semi-socially conscious adult.
And the whole “asymptomatic transmission” thing is an angels on the head of a pin argument. At the time of being infectious, a person may very well be asymptomatic. Whether they subsequently develop symptoms is a matter of prognostication, which we suck at. Asymptomatic or presymptomatic, the fact is we need to be aware that folks with no symptoms (the literal definition of “asymptomatic”) do, in fact, spread the disease.
Edited. My reading of the violin plots in 1A is that the heaviest viral loads tend to be among people not (yet) showing other signs of the disease.
Still… as much as l would like to refer our MPP to @anon29537550 for a consult on paediatric COVID, I’m sure the good doctor has enough to do. I like the graphics in the paper, which makes it something my MPP (who is a nurse) can likely communicate to our Premier (whose dubious qualifications I have already noted ad nauseum).
Proponents of the idea mix arguments in ways which raise red flags. Wade, discussed above and elsewhere, is brewing conspiracy bullshit. This virus isn’t a construct, there is no cabal with financial interests behind the pandemic. I think we can agree on that.
What now happens is moving goalposts, and likely so because of the traction gained by the intelligence report which seems to corroborate that some cases could possibly have pre-dated the first so far confirmed cases.
This does not make it more likely that the virus escaped from a lab. And it doesn’t even touch the conspiracy bullshit that it’s manmade. But those people of course jump on it, as you can observe on the WH briefing.
I say, yes, we can and should dismiss the idea. This is politics, and it is using the inherent problem of science and scientists: that we cannot completely rule out something entirely in most cases. That it is highly unlikely gets lost in the reporting. Everyone looses, and we waste our time on discussing this instead of discussing how we end the pandemic. Which isn’t over.
Some of them, absolutely. But as I mentioned there are some serious, non-Trumpy researchers who’ve been very consistent all along about the accidental leak theory. They just tended to get drowned out by the crazies.
If we dismiss the idea for political reasons, then we’re playing the same game as the GOP antivaxxers who embraced it for political reasons. This is a serious matter of medical forensics.
I know. We have something similar where I am, where walk-in vaccination clinics are trying to lure people in with discounts and fun events. While Europe has its own share of vaxx denialists and Qidiots, you aren’t at the point yet of needing to bribe people to get the jab.
I’ve already had two students contact me about next semester, not wanting to have class in-person because we are requiring vaccines for attendance and they don’t want to comply. I’ve had to be pretty careful how I respond, as even here in the bluest state in the country I can get in hot water for making a completely sensible statement that can be spun politically.
The Bulletin has a top level meta story with lots of links, and roundly condemns the use of a “lab origin” idea as a scapegoat for government incompetence.
They also link to a counterpoint to the arginine codon “smoking gun” assertion.
Edit: Posted “without prejudice”… as it were. Whereas I think there may be logical errors in the arguments presented above, I’m not really in a position to resolve them.
However, they explicitly paint Anderson in their pro-lab-leak stories as an unreliable narrator, so linking to his article for the opposing view is a bit cynical.
The thing is, everything and everyone I have seen so far has the trouble of arguing from a viewpoint outside of at maximum tangentially related experience and expertise.
The expertise and experience of the people actually working on Corona viruses is important here. The conspiracy stuff tries to argue they have competing interests, and this gets repeated on this very topic, and elsewhere in the BBS. The basic principle of CT bullshit is “something will stick”, and my take is: that’s the case now.
I had a look at the international news response to the US declaring a renewed investigation, and I think whatever I say is of no importance any longer. Mark my word: science is on the loosing side, again. Public opinion is more important than scientific consensus and expertise.
ETA:
We don’t. We just don’t play the blame game, and stick to what we know and what we can know.
To be clear: China’s role is political, and they do interfere with finding the source population of the virus.
However, even without that, it is unlikely that we could ID it unequivocally. This does not mean to give it up. But it does mean that we do accept a likely explanation, and don’t start doing politics with unlikely scenarios. Also, it means not to confuse or mix CT bullshit with a careful scientific approach.
Alina Chan at MIT, the researchers from the South China University of Technology, and at least some of the 18 prominent scientists from around the world who published that recent letter in Science.
Edit to add: this article is a good read with additional background.
Thanks, will look at the Boston Magazine later.
The Science piece I looked at when it was published, and I try to separate it form the political fallout and the public opinion debate. I don’t read this as evidence or even likely lab escape scenario. Scientifically, we cannot rule it out. But that’s about it. And while I am curious, I am really annoyed what this piece is used for in the media.
is looking for a “consensus” on opening schools for the last month of the school year.
