Some of the early publications about COVID indicated that asymptomatic carriers were just as contagious as symptomatic carriers, but that doesn’t entirely make sense to me. There are the factors you cite, but also the cellular mechanics of infection. While many of the symptoms we experience during infection are due to the immune response rather than the infection itself, some of the symptoms are directly due to the infection. If someone is truly completely asymptomatic, then that has to mean they have fewer cells being turned into virus factories, which in turn means they should be shedding drastically fewer viral particles.
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