Is there asymptomatic spread of COVID-19?

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(KathyDopp) – Editor’s note: Below is a series of articles, studies and papers regarding the theory of asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19, as compiled by Kathy Dopp.

1. In the investigative report – “The Lies Exposed by the Numbers” – “I documented the worst of the lies, half-truths, and misdirection used by our public health officials to manipulate public perceptions throughout the pandemic. The public messaging surrounding the COVID vaccination campaign has been just as crooked. So, I thought I would do what the government has refused to do: calculate your Vegas odds of death from the virus so you can weigh those odds against the risks of getting the jab.”

2. July 27, 2021. The next report is entitled “Majority Of Hospitalized Covid Patients In UK Only Tested Positive After Admission: Leaked NHS Data.” Over half of those hospitalized with COVID-19 in the UK only tested positive after admission – suggesting that “vast numbers are being classed as hospitalised by Covidwhen they were admitted with other ailments, with the virus picked up by routine testing,” according to The Telegraph, citing leaked government figures.

“It creates an impression that all these people are going into hospital with Covid, and that simply is not the case. People are worried and scared and not really understanding the true picture – that is what I find despicable,” one NHS data expert told the Telegraph.

I wonder how many U.S. COVID-19 hospitalizations were only diagnosed post-admission, keeping in mind of course that U.S. hospitals are paid more for COVID patients under the CARES Act.

3. July 23, 2021. An interview on Ingraham Angle of Peter McCullough, MD, MPH, entitled “Treatment and Natural Immunity Will See Us Through Delta Outbreak.” 

4. May 22, 2021. “How did a disease with no symptoms take over the world?” A biologist discusses that “a viral infection does not necessarily result in a disease. … the only reasonable conclusion we can draw about the creation of an asymptomatic disease is that it wasn’t done by a biologist but instead by individuals (probably on the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours (SPI-B)) whose agenda is not to convey accurate information to the public but something different: fear and uncertainty.” UK: Delta variant vs hospitalizations.

5. April 21, 2021. “People overestimate the risks of COVID-19.”

6. April 15, 2021. “Lack of cross-transmission of SARS-CoV-2 between passenger’s cabins on the Diamond Princesscruise ship.” When there was an outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the virus circulated freely for two weeks in the confined environment of the ship and its infection curve among passengers peaked and declinedat least two days before quarantine was imposed. The average age of the 3,711 persons on board was 60 years. A total of 696, about 19%, were infected and 14 died, a case fatality rate of about 2%, at a time before medical doctors had discovered effective treatments. “We infer from our analysis that most infections in passengers started on 28 January and were completed by 6 February, except in those who shared a cabin with another infected passenger. The distribution of the infected cabins was random, and no spatial cluster of the infected can be identified. We infer that the ship’s central air-conditioning system for passenger’s cabins did not play a role in SARS-CoV-2 transmission, i.e. airborne transmission did not occur between cabins during the outbreak, suggesting that the sufficient ventilation was provided. We also infer that the ship’s cabin drainage system did not play a role.” Thus, it was known since at least mid-February that a COVID-19 epidemic would decline naturally well before 60% of people were infected even though all or almost all were exposed, presumably owing to varying degrees of susceptibility in the population.

7. April 14, 2021. “Asymptomatic spread of COVID-19 – the biggest lie of our times.”

8. April 19, 2021. “Republicans open schools, Democrats still keeping them closed.” The latest data underscore an appallingly partisan split on what should be a more science-based decision.

9. April 6, 2020, and updated March 13, 2021. “Are Hospitals Spreading the Virus?”

10. April 8, 2021. “Eminent doc: Media censored COVID-19 early treatment options that could have reduced fatalities by 85%.” Dr. Peter McCullough also explained that given an 80% level of herd immunity, broad vaccination has ‘no scientific, clinical or safety rationale.

Addressing the broad “misinformation” of asymptomatic transfer of COVID-19, which has supported the need for lockdowns due to the notion that the virus can be unintentionally spread by infectious, asymptomatic people, the medical professor said, “One of the mistakes I heard today as a rationale for vaccination is asymptomatic spread. And I want to be very clear about this: My opinion is there is a low degree, if any, of asymptomatic spread. Sick person gives it to sick person. The Chinese have published a study … [of] 11 million people. They tried to find [evidence of] asymptomatic spread. You can’t find it. And that’s been, you know, one of important pieces of misinformation.”

11. April 2021. “What proportion of people with COVID-19 do not get symptoms?”  The actual number of people who get infected with the SARS-Cov-2 virus who have no symptoms is approximately 1 in 19.

12. January 23 – March 12, 2020. This one study finding pre-symptomatic spread was published by the U.S. CDC, not in a peer-reviewed journal, used only PCR tests to confirm cases, many cases of which did not  exhibit cough symptom and some cases were married couples, so is not wholly convincing:“Presymptomatic Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 — Singapore, January 23–March 16, 2020.”

13. March 2021. The Diamond Princess Told Us About Pre-Existing Immunity, Asymptomatic Infection and the Infection Fatality Rate. Why Were Those Lessons Ignored?”

14. December 2020. “Giant Study Disproves Myth Of Asymptomatic COVID Spread.” “A total of 1,174 close contacts of the asymptomatic positive cases were traced, and they all tested negative for the COVID-19,” the study concluded. Both the asymptomatic patients and their contacts were placed in isolation for a period of no less than two weeks and the results remained the same. “None of detected positive cases or their close contacts became symptomatic or newly confirmed with COVID-19 during the isolation period,” the study found.

15. November 2020. “Post-lockdown SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid screening in nearly ten million residents of Wuhan, China.”

16. December 14, 2020. “Household Transmission of SARS-CoV-2A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.” The findings of this study suggest that given that individuals with suspected or confirmed infections are being referred to isolate at home, households will continue to be a significant venue for transmission of SARS-CoV-2.

17. Letter to the New England Journal of Medicine Open Schools, Covid-19, and Child and Teacher Morbidity in Sweden. The letter was written by  Jonas F. Ludvigsson, M.D., Ph.D., Lars Engerström, M.D., Ph.D., Charlotta Nordenhäll, M.D., Ph.D., Emma Larsson, M.D., Ph.D. Despite Sweden’s having kept schools and preschools open, the authors found a low incidence of severe COVID-19 among schoolchildren and children of preschool age during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Among the 1.95 million children who were 1 to 16 years of age, 15 children had COVID-19, MIS-C, or both conditions and were admitted to an ICU, which is equal to 1 child in 130,000.

18. March 2021. “Risk of Asymptomatic Spread Minimal. Variants Over-Hyped. Masks Pointless.” An interview with Professor Jay Bhattacharya.

19. 2020. “New research finds no evidence that schools are playing a significant role in driving spread of the Covid-19 virus in the community.” Research led by epidemiologists at the University of Warwick has found that there is no significant evidence that schools are playing a significant role in driving the spread of the COVID-19 disease in the community, particularly in primary schools.  However, careful continued monitoring may be required as schools re-open to stay well informed about the effect they have upon community incidence.

20. 2020 “No evidence of secondary transmission of COVID-19 from children attending school in Ireland.” Published in Eurosurveillance, the article was written byLaura Heavey, Geraldine Casey, Ciara Kelly, David Kelly, and Geraldine McDarby. Contact tracing of over 10,000 contacts found no transmission by children.

21. January 2021. “Incidence and Secondary Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Infections in Schools,” written by Kanecia O. Zimmerman, Ibukunoluwa C. Akinboyo, M. Alan Brookhart, Angelique E. Boutzoukas, Kathleen McGann, Michael J. Smith, Gabriela Maradiaga Panayotti, Sarah C. Armstrong, Helen Bristow, Donna Parker, Sabrina Zadrozny, David J. Weber and Daniel K. Benjamin. The study was undertaken for The ABC Science Collaborative. Pediatrics January 2021, e2020048090; it studied 90,000 students and staff. No instances of child-to-adult transmission of SARS-COV-2 virus was found.

22. March 2021. “Relation of severe COVID-19 in Scotland to transmission-related factors and risk conditions eligible for shielding support”: REACT-SCOT case-control study. In both the shielded (the “clinically extremely vulnerable” – about 3% of the population) and the general population, the risk of severe COVID-19 (defined as requiring intensive care or dying) increased with the number of adults but decreased with the number of school-age children in the household. Severe COVID-19 was strongly associated with recent exposure to hospital… (Together with the high risk found in nursing homes, almost all severe COVID-19 cases are from hospitals or occur in elderly care homes. This helps to explain why lockdowns, despite the intuitive logic of keeping people apart, are consistently foundto have little or no relationship to mortality or infection rates.)

23. August 2020. “Asymptomatic cases may be of great value in containing the pandemic.”

The following table is a summary analysis of groups who were together for long periods without any ability to distance and shared the same kitchen and ventilation systems.  Thus, the prevalence of COVID-19 in these groups can give us an idea of the share of the population prone to getting COVID symptoms.  Overall, it seems that slightly less than 8% of the population were susceptible to symptomatic COVID-19. However the rate is closer to 60% for nursing home facility residents.

24. December 2020. “Video: W.H.O. Says Covid-19 Asymptomatic Transmission Is ‘Very Rare’.”

25. “Sweden’s health agency says open schools did not spur pandemic spread among children,” written by Helena Soderpalm.

26.December 2020. “Has the Evidence of Asymptomatic Spread of COVID-19 been Significantly Overstated?” Written by Dr Clare Craig FRCPath and Jonathan Engler MBChB LLB. The study found: “Evidence of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from patients who remain asymptomatic (as opposed to pre-symptomatic) is found in a body of numerous meta-analyses. Evidence of asymptomatic transmission has been based on only a handful of instances which themselves are questionable. The existence of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from asymptomatic individuals has become an accepted truth but the evidence for this phenomenon being anything other than mistaken interpretation of false positive test results is weak. Examination of the underlying data from the most frequently-cited such meta-analyses reveals that the conclusions are based on a surprisingly small number of cases (six in total globally) and, moreover, the possibility that they are all coincidental contacts with false positive results cannot be ruled out. Transmission which is pre-symptomatic is rare and represents a negligible risk to the population. It is questionable therefore whether any of the extensive testing, tracing, isolation and lockdown policies have delivered any worthwhile benefit over and above strategies which seek to advise symptomatic individuals to self-isolate.

27. November 2020. “‘No evidence’ that asymptomatic Covid-19 cases were infectious, analysis of post-lockdown Wuhan concludes.” This paper analyzed the results of a massive post-lockdown COVID-19 testing drive that included nearly every eligible resident of Wuhan, China and found no evidence that positive cases without symptoms spread the disease.

28. November 2020. “Post-lockdown SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid screening in nearly ten million residents of Wuhan, China.” The study found: Stringent COVID-19 control measures were imposed in Wuhan between January 23 and April 8, 2020. Estimates of the prevalence of infection following the release of restrictions could inform post-lockdown pandemic management. Here, we describe a city-wide SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid screening programme between May 14 and June 1, 2020 in Wuhan. All city residents aged six years or older were eligible and 9,899,828 (92.9%) participated. No new symptomatic cases and 300 asymptomatic cases (detection rate 0.303/10,000, 95% CI 0.270-0.339/10,000) were identified. There were no positive tests amongst 1,174 close contacts of asymptomatic cases. 107 of 34,424 previously recovered COVID-19 patients tested positive again (re-positive rate 0.31%, 95% CI 0.423-0.574%). The prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Wuhan was therefore very low five to eight weeks after the end of lockdown.

29. “What the data say about asymptomatic COVID infections.” People without symptoms can pass on the virus, but estimating their contribution to outbreaks is challenging.

30. “Asymptomatic infected persons do not tend to spread infection.” A Study on Infectivity of Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 Carriers

31. July 2020. “COVID-19 in primary schools: no significant transmission among children or from students to teachers.”

32. July 2020. “Re-opening schools in Sweden & Finland did not worsen outbreak

33. July 2020. “How CNN deceives about asymptomatic transmission of SARS-CoV-2,” by Jeremy R. Hammond. On August 20, 2020 US media reported that [all] children are “silent spreaders of COVID ,” citing a study of 49 “Children ages 0-22 years with suspected severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection presenting to urgent care clinics or being hospitalized for confirmed/suspected SARS-CoV-2 infection.” 61.7% of these sickest Massachusetts’ children are over the age of 10 and most have prior medical conditions. These are not normal healthy asymptomatic children. These children’s viral levels were compared to some of the sickest, many intubated, adult patients whose cytokine storms had eliminated the virus from their bodies and were deeply ill.  The fallacious study is posted HERE.

34. October 2020. “Schools aren’t super-spreaders. Fears from the summer appear to have been overblown. By Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University.

35. “Epidemiologist: ‘Social Distancing’ does not stop spread of COVID-19, only vulnerable should shelter.”

36. “Sharing a household with children and risk of COVID-19: a study of over 300,000 adults living in healthcare worker households in Scotland.”

Kathy Dopp holds an MS in mathematics and is an independent researcher, focusing on COVID-19 topics March 2020 to current, compiling links to studies, articles, analysis, and data at kathydopp.info/COVIDinfo/, author of Election Integrity Audits to Ensure Election Outcome Accuracy; published in mathematics text New Sinc Methods of Numerical Analysis pp 123-145, former owner of one of the first Internet Service Providers in Utah 1994-2001, designed and architected two passive and active solar homes. 

Reprinted with permission from Kathy Dopp