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Comment by enriquec | Hacker News Reader

Tegnell was proven right according to the latest research:

"Previous studies have shown that asymptomatic individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus were infectious3, and might subsequently become symptomatic4. Compared with symptomatic patients, asymptomatic infected persons generally have low quantity of viral loads and a short duration of viral shedding, which decrease the transmission risk of SARS-CoV-25. In the present study, virus culture was carried out on samples from asymptomatic positive cases, and found no viable SARS-CoV-2 virus. All close contacts of the asymptomatic positive cases tested negative, indicating that the asymptomatic positive cases detected in this study were unlikely to be infectious."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w

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To me, this sounds like Tegnell (who is an expert and has studied viruses and pandemics) knows what he's talking about. If you've ever seen an interview with him it becomes quite apparent that he's got a real scientidic mindset.

That study is an extremely weak support to the claim that this virus can't spread asymptomatically - it's nearly useless for that purpose. They only studied a small number of people at the very tail end of the infection who showed that they had some evidence of virus in them. They did not look at whether those patients actually had an active infection - they could have simply been detecting remnants of dead virus in their systems. They certainly didn't look at all at people in the incubation stage pre-symptoms.

Nature is one of the two top journals in the world and their conclusions directly contradict what you're saying. This was a study of 10,000,000 people.

Reading the article I understood it like this.

~10 million residents from Wuhan (almost same size as Swedish population) got screened for covid. In ~30k people who recovered from covid, 107 tested positive for covid a second time. Roughly ~1000 people were in contact with asymptomatic carriers, but none (as in 0) tested positive for covid.

I did some simple google searching as well, and while it seems possible to transmit the virus without symptoms it also seems that a small minority of cases are transmitted by asymptomatic carriers. The numbers I find are ~20%. Sure, that isn't negligible, but I can understand why experts would base a strategy on those with symptoms.

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