Presumably in two weeks, when we know whether more of these thousands of people go on to develop symptoms or not.
Is anybody following up on stories like this? Do we have any from two weeks ago?
The best follow-up we have is from the cruise ship, where at the time of testing more than half of those who tested positive were asymptomatic, but ultimately something like 80% of the confirmed infected ended up with symptoms.
I probably saw that factoid hyped up in multiple media stories which misconstrued the original paper.
If anyone knows of more reliable recent sources about this, it would be great to clear it up.
Also lots of information in the comments.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.18.20038125v...
In particular, that CDC report I linked above citing 46.5% is from late March (early release on March 23, published on March 27th).
That report cites a website by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare [1], which itself confirms that 46.5% (331/712) is up-to-date as of March 26th.
I'm not very knowledgeable about stats, to be perfect honest, but I think your paper must've turned out to be a red herring. Maybe they got unlucky with their sample?
[1] https://www.mhlw.go.jp/stf/seisakunitsuite/bunya/newpage_000...
1) that the asymptomatic rate for this Coronavirus is much higher than other Coronaviruses.
2) but at the same time, it's more deadly than most Coronaviruses.
3) and it's also the R0 is much higher than other Coronaviruses.
Isn't it more likely there's a testing issue? This seems a lot like a person that runs a SQL query that overturns all established data at a business, and instead of first assuming that their query is wrong, they instead assume everyone at the business is wrong.
I'm not saying the tests are inaccurate. I'm saying when you get highly conflicting data that has critical implications, you shouldn't jump to conclusions. And you should prepare for the worst case, not assume the best.
R0 depends on the population you measure. In a high contact, crowded place, the R0 could be very high. In a population staying at home, the R0 could be very low.
All those 3 numbers you cite are taken from the same small set of models where the rate of asymptomatic cases is an input. So, no, that's not right.