"Top U.S. expert sees 'glimmers' social distancing dampening virus spread"
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Here’s Why You Don’t Have to Feel Sick to Spread the Disease:
Researchers are scrambling to gauge the risk of COVID-19 transmission from people who appear to be healthy
Experts talk about what it means to be infected without being sick, and how that seems to be making the novel coronavirus very easy to spread.
Many COVID-19 cases are thought to be mild, and infected individuals with mild or no reported symptoms are still contagious and capable of spreading the virus. Plus, the virus has a long incubation period, with many people not showing symptoms for an average of five days after infection. Together, these two factors result in a lot of people who are infected and spreading the virus without knowing it.
But how does transmission without symptoms actually work? Examining how people can spread the flu and common cold in a similar way may help us understand how people can spread COVID-19 when they don’t feel sick. Recent studies also suggest that understanding asymptomatic transmission of the virus could be key to understanding how COVID-19 is spreading — and, hopefully, to eventually stopping it.
Infected and Feeling Fine
Even when there isn’t a pandemic going on, many people are walking around and going about their regular lives — shedding viruses all the while.
In a 2018 study, Jeffrey Shaman, director of the climate and health program at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, and colleagues found that about 7 percent of people passing through a New York City tourist attraction in February were shedding some kind of virus as they went. In the study, the researchers asked people passing through a popular attraction about how they were feeling and swabbed their noses. Of those who tested positive for viral infections like human rhinovirus and influenza, about 65 to 97 percent did not report any symptoms.
“I want to note that ‘asymptomatic’ is a very swirly definition,” says Shaman, meaning that symptoms are self-reported and, therefore, subjective. But, in general, it means people who do not report feeling sick but do have a proven viral infection.
1 day ago · The analysis is based on location data from mobile devices
New York governor Andrew Cuomo said he thought Americans would be living with the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic for a long time. ‘I don’t think we get back to normal,’ Cuomo said. ‘I think we get to a new normal.’ The governor also emphasised that states need to be better prepared for such crises because ‘something like this will happen again’ video:www.theguardian.com/...
Fueling a Pandemic
In a study published in the journal Science earlier this month, Shaman and his colleagues found that undocumented COVID-19 cases were responsible for 86 percent of the spread of the disease in China before the country enacted travel restrictions on January 23, 2020.
The scientists estimated that undocumented cases were about half as contagious as people with confirmed and documented disease. There is likely a correlation between symptom severity and the amount of virus your body is shedding, says Shaman. It stands to reason that if a person is sicker and coughing more, for example, they could be spreading more virus into the community and may be more contagious. But because of the sheer quantity of people with undocumented cases of COVID-19, those people did the “lion’s share of transmission,” says Shaman.
In another recent analysis of COVID-19 spread in China, researchers found that about 10 percent of patients were infected by someone who had the virus but had not yet started to show symptoms. This is not entirely unusual — for some viruses, this pre-symptomatic transmission is possible, says Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin who helped lead the study.www.discovermagazine.com/...
"Social distancing appears to be slowing the spread of coronavirus in some areas but crisis won't end soon, officials say"
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NEWS:
British American Tobacco working on plant-based coronavirus vaccine
BAT has turned the vast resources usually focused on creating products that pose health risks to millions of smokers worldwide to battling the global pandemic
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Clinical Trials Set To Determine If Anti-Malaria Drug Effective Against COVID-19
www.npr.org/...
Covid 19 support on Daily Kos
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Thursday, Apr 2, 2020 · 12:59:25 AM +00:00 · Angmar
another case of spring break gone wild, a group of young adults from Texas came back from spring break with some rough news: They tested positive for coronavirus. About 70 adults in their 20s returned from a spring break trip in Mexico on March 19. Twenty-eight from the University of Texas at Austin have tested positive for COVID-19 since their return, health officials confirmed on Tuesday. According to the Austin Public Health Department, the group had departed together in a chartered plane, but some flew back on separate commercial flights. While four of the confirmed cases did not present any symptoms before testing positive, “dozens more are under public health investigation,” the department said
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