Study: 44% of patients caught coronavirus from healthy-looking people

Both parameters can be evaluated independently of each other, and when compared, they can help to estimate the same proportion of asymptomatic infections: if the serial interval in the population is on average less than the incubation period, then a certain proportion of infections occur before the symptoms begin to manifest. And to calculate this fraction, you need to compare the distribution of these two values. This, however, is not enough: it is also necessary to evaluate how the obtained values ​​are consistent with the amount of virus that is present in saliva and other secretions, and how these values ​​change over time.

During the outbreak of another coronavirus epidemic, the severe acute respiratory syndrome SARS / SARS in 2003, it became clear that the peak of the patient's ability to become infected occurred in the period of 7-10 days after the onset of primary symptoms. Therefore, quarantine measures, which are most convenient to apply to obviously ill people, worked in this case very effectively. Influenza, for example, often becomes significantly contagious even before the onset of the main symptoms or at the very beginning of their manifestation.

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In published in Nature Medicine The researchers analyzed the course of the disease in 94 patients with confirmed coronavirus infection (none of them was a critically severe patient). Throat swabs were taken within 32 days after the onset of symptoms. It turned out that the peak concentration of the virus in the mucous membranes begins around the time of the onset of the first symptoms of the disease, and then decreases and practically disappears by about 21 days. Neither gender, nor age, nor the severity of the human disease affected this.

Attempts to estimate the real number of people infected from asymptomatic carriers have already been made in Singapore and Tianjin. If in the work published in Nature Medicine, the number of people infected from such carriers is estimated at about 44%, then in other studies this estimate was 48% or even 62%. Scientists suggest that this may be due to the introduction of strict quarantine measures that prevented infection in Singapore and China at the later stages of the disease of each infected person.

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The data from a work published in Nature Medicine cannot be considered completely complete. For example, the moment of the onset of primary symptoms was noted retrospectively: patients themselves spoke about this after they were diagnosed. In addition, scientists note that the more reliable information about a particular case of transmission of infection, the longer the serial interval, and this suggests that, on average, these intervals are somewhat underestimated. Finally, patients received treatment, which could affect the concentration of the virus in the mucous membranes, and, accordingly, data on the rate of its decline could also be underestimated relative to the drug-free scenario.

Nevertheless, scientists have shown that, on average, an infected person is likely to infect others two to three days before the onset of symptoms of the disease, and that the concentration of the virus in the blood is already at its maximum on the day the primary symptoms occur. This, of course, is worth taking into account: you can unjustifiably consider yourself, your neighbor or a courier who has arrived completely healthy, while the potential source of infection also does not suspect anything and feels good.

As ForumDaily wrote earlier:

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• Fox News: 'null patient' infected with COVID-19 in Wuhan virology laboratory.