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Comment by FiberBundle | Hacker News Reader

In a region in Italy they tested [1] people twice, 2 weeks apart, and found that 43% were completely asymptomatic over the course of the infection.

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.20053157v...

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About 50% of the population in that study is over 50. I think it's a bad idea to draw generic conclusions about the disease from a diverse age range. You end up with conclusions that aren't relevant to either. Glossing over the tables I don't see any data about symptomatic over the two weeks by age. I'd be shocked if the rates of becoming symptomatic are not much higher for the elderly and much lower for the young. Didn't read it in depth though.

See: Simpson’s paradox, where trends in subgroups, taken together, can indicate a different trend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

Trends in subgroups can indicate a different trend. The above comment is not about a linear trend. It's about an average statistic for a population based on a sample that's not representative of the population age distribution for a process that probably isn't linear across ages. If the older half becomes symptomatic 100% of the time, and the younger half becomes symptomatic 0% of the time, it's very misleading, though not technically incorrect to say people become symptomatic 50% of the time. There's a huge impact on how to handle the problem.

Doesn’t that mean that 57% were symptomatic?

I didn't intend to contradict you. Granted it's totally valid to assume that many people who are tested positive and show no symptoms might develop some later, but I just thought it might be of interest to some people to have numbers where they tested patients twice over a long enough interval to conclude that they really were asymptomatic.

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