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glic3rinu | 6 years ago

> Consider the incubation time of 5 days avg, 14 days max during which you're already infectious."

I have seen several comments like this on this thread suggesting people are contagious during the incubation phase. Do you have a source for this? AFAIK this has not yet been confirmed, other than perhaps a few anecdotal cases.

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iforgotpassword|6 years ago

I'm also just aware of a few anecdotal cases, but I guess this is very hard to scientifically confirm by its nature. There have been several cases in the US where it could not be traced back where they could have been infected (which could or could not be asymptomatic, or just incomplete knowledge of contacts). The first case in Germany was also asymptomatic spread[1]. Even if this just happens in few cases it would still be devastating, especially if it also happens with those that go completely asymptomatic for the entirety of their infection, which is currently said to be about 10 to 20% of all infections.

I check out John Campbell on YouTube every couple days. He has this unique style of presenting current developments and research papers in a no-bs manner and commenting on them, currently urging for more proactive measures mostly.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2001468?url_ver=Z...

creato|6 years ago

People need to stop talking about this as a binary yes or no fact. It is almost guaranteed that it is possible to infect someone else while not showing symptoms and this probably has actually happened. The question is how common it is. Most credible sources I've seen seem to say that it is unlikely/uncommon.

It seems likely that if we fully controlled most of the cases that had visible symptoms, the spread would stop, even if we failed to control the cases which did not show symptoms.

The same is true for spread via surfaces: while I'm sure it's possible and happens, it seems like the primary mechanism of infection is breathing infected respiratory droplets from someone else.

Sources: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/transmission...

ethbro|6 years ago

Last guidance I saw from the CDC was that people without obvious symptoms were likely to only be contact-infectious, as opposed to airborne-infectious (droplets) once symptomatic.

If true, social distancing, hand hygiene, and not touching ones face would bring asymptomatic transmission down to almost zero.