China, which has been praising itself for its draconian response in shutting down much of the country for most of February and thus halting the spread of the coronavirus pandemic domestically (at least if one ignores the glaring discrepancies from reports on the ground), may have a new problem on its hands.
According to the South China Morning Post, which cited classified data from the Chinese government, as many as a third of the people who test positive for the coronavirus – also known as “silent carriers” – may show delayed symptoms or none at all.
The data show that 43,000 people in China tested positive by the end of February, but had no actual symptoms, the newspaper reported. They were quarantined and monitored, though as we noted last month, in a radical change in how China is underreporting the severity of the disease, asymptomatic cases aren’t included in China’s tally of those infected with the virus.
“The number of novel coronavirus cases worldwide continues to grow, and the gap between reports from China and statistical estimates of incidence based on cases diagnosed outside China indicates that a substantial number of cases are underdiagnosed,” a group of Japanese experts led by Hiroshi Nishiura, an epidemiologist at Hokkaido University, wrote in a letter to the International Journal of Infectious Diseases in February. Based on his research, Nishiura put the proportion of asymptomatic Japanese patients evacuated from Wuhan, ground zero of the outbreak in China, at 30.8 per cent – similar to the classified Chinese government data.
Another useful point of reference is the data collected from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined for weeks in Yokohama, Japan. All of its passengers and crew were tested, with 712 people testing positive – 334 of whom were asymptomatic, according to official Japanese figures. – READ MORE
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