Asymptomatic people with Covid are only responsible for a tiny fraction of spread, a study in the Lancet has found, exploding a myth that formed a key part of social distancing policies and fear messaging during the pandemic.
The study, from a team at Imperial College London, is the latest to come out of the human challenge trial, in which 36 people were deliberately infected with SARS-CoV-2 and followed up.
Earlier results from the trial published last year made the surprising finding that only around half (53%) of those who were inoculated with a droplet of infected material in their nose – none of whom had known prior infections or antibodies – went on to test positive for the virus, indicating an unexpected level of immune resistance to the virus.
In the new paper, published in the Lancet Microbe, the researchers report that just 7% of virus emissions occurred before the first reported symptom, indicating that transmission during the presymptomatic phase is responsible for a tiny fraction of overall spread.
This contradicts a claim that was a key part of the case for universal social distancing, lockdown and masking policies, and was used extensively in fear messaging to induce compliance. For instance, numerous U.K. Government posters asserted that “around one in three people with COVID-19 don’t have any symptoms, but can still pass it on”.





The claim also cropped up frequently in the scientific literature, with a 2020 paper in Nature claiming: “Containment of COVID-19 is made difficult because, unlike SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2 is commonly spread by people showing no symptoms.”
But it turns out that this central plank of The Science is a myth. Almost all COVID-19 transmission occurs only once symptoms have begun.
Regarding truly asymptomatic infections, the researchers found just one participant (of 18) who had a period of testing positive but reported no symptoms at all. He or she did emit some virus, indicating that spread from people asymptomatic throughout a genuine infection is possible, but makes up only a tiny proportion of total spread.
Interestingly, the researchers also found evidence to support the super-spreader hypothesis, as 86% of total detected airborne virus was generated by just two participants (11%) over three days. With the researchers also finding no relationship between symptom severity and emissions (i.e., those with the worst symptoms didn’t necessarily emit the most virus), the study shows there is still much we don’t understand about viruses.
It is notable that this latest debunking of the official narrative came from Imperial College, with Professor Neil Ferguson himself one of the authors. It seems that sometimes even the arch-lockdowners have to give ground to the truth.
As another official ‘fact’ falls to the ground, please can we stop the censorship of dissent?
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‘… real free market liberalism hasn’t been tried in this country…’
Not quite true. It was a novel situation which occurred in this Country in the late 18th Century and provided the right conditions for the Industrial Revolution – why in Britain and not elsewhere – and lasted into the early 19th Century until Government realised it was missing out and there was a growing new area into which it could stick its nose and muddle and meddle.
But certainly it describes in a nutshell recent times. Failure is always attributed to those parts of the market that are relatively free rather than to the real cause, State intervention, and the remedy must therefore be more State intervention.
With respect to lots of baby reactors dotted over the landscape: the point about having a grid with multiple large generators strategically located, is to provide stability and continuity of supply in the event of failure of one or more generators, or the need for repair/maintenance.
It partly is the problem with wind mills and intermittency of supply due to changing wind conditions and why the argument ‘the wind is always blowing somewhere’ doesn’t work.
The advantages of “baby” reactors is well advertised, namely production largely in a factory. I was disappointed to learn how big the proposed RR SMR is and I would prefer a smaller one.
An advantage of spreading these around rather than lining them up at large sites to replicate the old reactors is the reduced transmission losses. It ought to be possible too to utilise the heat wich is typically wasted by having market gardens of district heating schemes fed from them.
Local reactors would also reduce public fear. Once they had experienced living with one on the outskirts of their town or at the nearby industrial park, they would realise they are not ticking time bombs.
What is not well advertised are the related issues with unit pricing, and the relationship with other parties, such as housing developers, private owners versus landlords and so on. District heating looks like a good idea, but once it’s in use it probably interferes with the choice of generating power at any given time, unless there’s some kind of local storage. At any rate, it’s another interface to manage. I know there have been systems like that in the past in England, though, e.g. when the old coal fired Battersea power station was operational.
Gotta love these American fairly tales with their neverchanging storyline of In the olde days, man lived in blissful anarchy and everything was perfect and then the evil state appeared out of nowhere, tried to take everthing over. Since then, it has all been going to hell in a handcard!
For a nice example of what the state busied itself with when it was still exclusively controlled by the rich and propertied while everybody else was free to die in whichever ways he liked best, one can look here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre
Peterloo was a monumental cock-up that resulted in 18 people dying. More people die than that on an average night out in Chicago. It wasn’t a ‘massacre’. It’s become a left wing myth that has become ever more fanciful in the retelling.
I’m fascinated by the leftist fairytale that in ye olde days, man lived in a blissful rural idyll and everything was perfect until evil industrialists enslaved the population in towns and cities. Forget the ignorance, the squalor, the disease and dunking local women in the village pond on witchcraft charges because people were dying of disease due to the squalor and ignorance…
Peterloo was a monumental cock-up that resulted in 18 people dying. More people die than that on an average night out in Chicago.
That’s besides the point. The state existed during the time of the anarchist paradise when everything was supposedly perfect because it didn’t. And it also intervened in society. Just on behalf of the people who nowadays want to abolish it because it doesn’t still exclusively act on their behalf.
If it moves, tax it.
If it keeps moving, legislate it.
If it stops moving, use taxpayers’ money to subsidise it.
Something like that. Who said it?
Where does one begin.
The failures of the state aren’t failures of the free market but the complete opposite, excess regulation and state meddlibg. TY points that out very well.
The rest of the authors “solution” is not a solution at all but an anxious call for something to be done. He doesn’t know what but he knows it should be done at a national level, it should probably involve more nuclear energy and fast trains and it has an authoritarian, fascist whiff about it with the emphasis of law and order and “beyond the electoral cycle”.
And he’s betting that putting Anglo in there will energise the crowd a bit.
Half baked, intellectual crap from someone that I am willing to bet spends his time thinking and writing and has no personal experience to understand that wealth creation and prosperity comes from enterprise, free exchange and hard work and not from the drawing board of self important, clever central planners.
His assertion that providing health care is one of the basic functions of the state shows the author’s complete lack of imagination and his indoctrinated state of mind.
The basic function of the state is to protect against external attack and to provide law and order for its sitizens. That’s it. The rest are nice to haves, or not, depending on where you stand.
To quote the great Thomas Sowell, there are no solutions, only trade offs.
Expecting or encouraging governments or the state to “solve” all our “problems” doesn’t seem to have been a success in the very recent past.
Some interesting ideas there, though I don’t think the solution is just about technology. The current mess that our nation has become is not due to a lack of the right technology but also a corrosive culture of national self-loathing and contempt for the norms of civilised society. There is a famous quote, possibly attributed to G.K. Chesterton: “when man stops believing in God he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything”. Believing in anything opens the door to insanity, which we are witnessing in the warped cults and dogmas of “progressive” ideology. Reconstructing UK society is going to be difficult until we get rid of this widespread madness and restore sanity.
“also a corrosive culture of national self-loathing and contempt for the norms of civilised society”
fostered and ramped up by academia. Time to close the universities.
I read this piece early, and was surprised to find that
Actually guys. I kind of like our old way of doing things.
Although committing the ultimate sin of replying to my own post…I didn’t mention that anyone who describes the WEF and Agenda 2030 as ‘conspiracy theories’ clearly is well off the pace with current affairs.
Yes, it sounds remarkably like “we need a Great Reset.”
In fact the solution to any gloom concerning the state of the nation is very straightforward:
‘If you knows of a better ‘ole…..’
I found myself in Eastern Europe a while ago, sounding off like a broken record about Britain’s problems, and the assembled company looked at me with incredulity.
‘Britain is a sanatorium…..’ was the consensus.
The problems we have are first world problems created by hopelessly incompetent leadership, and we voted for these lunatics from all three main parties over the last thirty years.
Democracy: the least worst system of government.
Nevertheless, to be born an Englishman today, incredibly, even more so than when the statement was first made, is still to be ‘born with a winning ticket in the lottery of life’.
I feel you are too optimistic about our ability and the willingness of the political class and the blob to allow us to prosper.
Slightly OT:
Juliet Samuel today writes in the DT “How governments and the cult of Net Zero wrecked the energy market” (H/T Net Zero Watch). But that is not quite right as it was the entire political class that wrecked the energy market. All of them. They were falling over themselves to be more keen on Net Zero than whatever the current policy ordained, just as with Covid lockdowns.
We must not let them off the hook, not to protect Milliband, Cameron-Clegg, May or Boris, but to ensure they are all tarred for the damage they have inflicted.
As Margaret Thatcher once said:
‘The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.’
Our problem is that the population has been conned into thinking that we’ve not become a socialist country over the past 25 years.
But when Wall Street runs out of other people’s overleveraged money and their bad bets go south, they get bailed out. And they laugh all the way to the bank. Talk about moral hazard!
Indeed! Crony capitalism. (i.e. not capitalism at all).
Corporatism. One might note that Musso said his government was not Fascist, rather Corporatist. Which is just another form, in reality.
Neoliberalism failed in 2008, when the cacophony of voices who had been crying Profit! Profit! Profit! since some time in the 1980s suddenly switched to crying Bailout! Bailout! Bailout! after it became known that they had just gambled away everything entrusted to them without generating any profits except in form of gargantuan charges they had paid to themselves.
What blew up in 2008 was the financial markets in derivatives and bank debt. These had expanded because governments in the USA and UK especially had expanded the money supply well beyond the needs of the economy.
in the USA the issue was exacerbated by the requirement to make home loans to people who would never repay. These were packaged up in novel ways to pretend the credit was good. Regulators did not notice!
2008 was nothing to do with free markets, capitalism or even normal banking. In evidence I point out that several western economies did not burn them because they had not committed the faults I mention.
of interest, whereas the UK banking sector has been blamed, most of it was solvent, albeit temporarily illiquid. Even the London branch of Lehmans paid all its creditors and the surplus was sent to their NY head office.
notice also that UK regulators wanted all mortgage lenders to copy Northern Rock and criticised managements that did not do so. The pressure was to behave irresponsibly.
Top comment. Clinton and the pressure his government placed on Banks to engage in ‘Sub Prime’ lending played a major, if not the major, part in ‘the new paradigm’ delusion and subsequent global financial disaster. ‘No more boom and bust’ Brown’s reputation never recovered, except in the Royal Navy!
Privatize the profits, socialize the costs, lather, rinse, and repeat….
The problem with investment bankers is that they’ll eventually run out of other people’s money.
🙂
The failure of the British state is because there’s too much of it and it interferes too much. Capitalism always gets blamed for state socialism’s failures and the solution offered is always more state socialism.
The best option is to allow a free market in energy. If the public want green power, they can pay for it from an unsubsidised green supplier. If they want it from gas or coal, they can get it from a fossil fuel supplier. If the public are mostly eco-loons as the state claim, then they’ll happily pay for more expensive green power and the coal and gas companies will go bust. Let’s see who wins…
“But how does Aris think we’re going to pay for all these nice things? The reason the state has become so hollowed out isn’t just due to woeful mismanagement by mediocre politicians and officials who are hamstrung by a moribund ideology and have no better ideas. It’s also because we’ve run out of money. Absent a magic money tree, I cannot see much future for Anglofuturism.”
I know I will probably be crucified for saying this, but as a Left Lockdown Sceptic myself (albeit a post-capitalist rather than a socialist or Marxist), that magic money tree (with the same initials, MMT) already exists. Just ask author Rodger Malcolm Mitchell. In a nutshell, Monetary Sovereignty, similar Modern Monetary Theory, posits that any government that is the issuer of it’s own sovereign currency, such as the UK or USA or Canada or the EU (but not the Euro countries individually, or state and local governments currently), by definition has infinite money that it can create on an ad hoc basis, no taxes or borrowing required. Period, full stop. Life is NOT a zero-sum game. And before anyone cries “inflation!”, keep in mind that inflations are caused by shortages of goods and services, NOT by money creation. And solving the shortages can be done by the government purchasing such goods and services at a premium and selling them at a loss, so as to incentivize production of such. Raising interest rates can also fight inflation by raising the value of the currency and slowing down borrowing and spending, but doing so is a razor-sharp, double-edged sword in practice.
QED
Sovereign governments can clearly create as much money as they like, but they can’t force anybody else to accept that the value of that money is unchanged.
They can and do have absolute control of the value of the currency they issue. That’s why it is called FIAT currency, as it is valued by fiat. Of course, when it is not formally backed by anything other than the full faith and credit of the government, it is in practice backed by all the goods and services of the economy. That governments choose to let the market decide its de facto value does not invalidate the fact of control over valuation of money if they wanted to. They can redefine a currency at will, and/or raise or lower interest rates.
Decades of neoliberal austerity would do that.
How governments and the cult of net zero wrecked the energy market
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/08/27/how-governments-and-the-cult-of-net-zero-wrecked-the-energy-market/
I wonder why we do not see common sense like this from the Telegraph’s business reporters, such as the naive Ben Marlow?
By Paul Homewood
Good News Weekend
We are a nation run by cowards but we will win in the end
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(1 year, 1 week, 1 day from our first appearance there)
Stand in the Park Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am – make friends & keep sane
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It sounds to me like Aris also believes in unicorns, Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy.
Or maybe, it’s Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz “Click your heels together three times and say ‘There’s no place like home‘ and you’ll be there.”
There IS no Anglo left to preserve. It’s been destroyed by mass immigration and multi-culturalism. Now we are disparate “communities” living apart together in the land that used to be Angloland (England).
“officials who are hamstrung by a moribund ideology and have no better ideas.”
They are not allowed ideas and definitely not verbalise them. It seems no official can make an intelligent decision of their own and it is this that stultifies progress.
Yep it’s like the governmental equivalent of the SouthPark gnomes venture startup:
Underpants, ?, Money