Thread by @AndreasShrugged

The idea that weak or absence of evidence for asymptomatic spread is making a case against lockdowns and other preventive measures is self-defeating in so many ways. So I'll just list a few:

https://twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1340663331229601793

If asymptomatic spread wasn't a thing, it would imply that all the cases must be the result of symptomatic spreaders. This would imply we would have to quarantine everyone with cold symptoms ultra-hard, not less, because apparently their distancing and mask-wearing isn't enough.

Further, the study that found only few 100 asymptomatic cases and no symptomatic cases among 10M people was done in Wuhan - the place that had locked down ultra-ultra-hard. Did the lockdown achieved the almost total suppression of the virus? Looks like it. nature.com/articles/s4146…

Again, the study found 300 asymptomatic and 0 symptomatic cases. This means 100% of the spread that was going on in Wuhan in May was asymptomatic. It seems like a stretch to argue from there that asymptomatic spread isn't a thing. How did the 300 asymptomatic get infected?

Finally, should we trust the 300 asymptomatic cases in the first place? Probably not. Ten million tests will produce a few false-positives, which surprisingly doesn't seem like a problem for the anti-lockdown folks when the case numbers can be interpreted against lockdowns.

Further, virus cultures were negative for all positive cases, "indicating no “viable virus”". This suggests that these cases had already recovered from an infection (190 were antibody-positive) and the tests only found RNA fragments. No large potential for secondary infections.

What to make of the negative test results of the close contacts of the asymptomatic cases? See above - and we don't know which preventive measures they took no matter of symptoms or not.

In general, the biggest caveat about the 'asymptomatic' notion is that 'asymptomatic' can also mean 'presymptomatic'. We know that infected people can be contagious days before experiencing symptoms. That's a strong point in favor of general distancing, masks, hygiene.