health

Presymptomatic virus patients can contaminate environments: study

3 Comments
By GREG BAKER

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© 2020 AFP

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This just further proves that we should not be too hasty in reopening. Asymptomatic people would probably do a lot more damage

0 ( +2 / -2 )

But we are not being too hasty Mirai. Its still June 1st in Tokyo - no change is imminent. How MUCH longer do you want to wait? If there was to be a second spike I'd fully support a return to the currect situation. But where do you draw a line without people actually dropping dead? I'm as worried about this as the next person but we do have to get on woth life as some point. More people will die from the effects of the recession than the virus if we continue with this indefintely. More and more Scientists/Doctors are now openly expressing their view that a safe, reliable Vaccine is probably YEARS away at best. The Virus is so deep inside our society now that eradication is a distant dream. We are going to have to learn to live with it.

1 ( +2 / -1 )

Not so interesting article because it only expands a little on what is already known.

Asymptomatic infected people shed viruses, that is not something unexpected since people can get infected from them, and anybody that shed viruses contaminates the surfaces they come in contact. So it was assumed that asymptomatic patients could transmit the infection directly or indirectly.

But in this report they just collected the RNA, which means the virus may not even be infectious ("dead" viruses are still detected this way) and there is no comparison to the levels of contamination found from symptomatic patients, so we end up the same, not knowing how important is this.

They could have isolated the virus (inoculate cells with them to see if the virus can still infect, and how much) or give information about how the PCR titers are compared with patients that have symptoms (it would be not the same if the titers are 5 times lower or 5000 times lower). But since they did not do this we only know what we already knew before.

4 ( +4 / -0 )

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