Nothing's Clear, And They Like It That Way

I posted yesteday about the imprecise language Drs Fauci and Walensky use in discussing COVID. In one sentence on last Sunday's talks, Dr Fauci used "infected" with two different meanings. Infected-a meant only that antibodies were detected in tests irrespective of symptoms. Infected-b meant someone "had" COVID, i.e., symptoms, like someone "has" cancer or the flu. This has been a basic problem with how COVID has been discussed from the start, and it's led to the widespread fear that a positive test is a death sentence.

So this leads to another question that nobody really answers: what's the likelihood that someone who tests positive will develop symptoms at all? As of July 2020, this site published an official CDC estimate:

Asymptomatic coronavirus carriers, or those who do not experience any symptoms, unknowingly contribute to the spread of COVID-19, infectious disease experts say. Now the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued new guidance that raises the estimate of asymptomatic carriers to 40 percent of people who have COVID-19.

Previously, the CDC estimated asymptomatic carriers at 35 percent, a figure reported in late May. The agency concedes that “asymptomatic cases are difficult to identify and transmission is difficult to observe and quantify.”

The CDC had estimated that the chance of transmission of COVID-19 from asymptomatic people was 100 percent. But that figure has been revised downward this month to 75 percent. That means that the CDC now says asymptomatic individuals are less likely to transmit infection, compared to symptomatic individuals who have a 100 percent chance of transmission.

But in January 2021, the CDC published different results using (oh, boy) a model.

Overall, the model predicted that 59% of coronavirus transmission would come from people without symptoms, including 35% from people who were pre-symptomatic and 24% from those who never showed symptoms at all.

Jay Butler, CDC deputy director for infectious diseases and co-author of the study, admitted the researchers used "a fairly simple mathematical model" for such a complicated and continually evolving pandemic, but they were nonetheless "surprised how well it held up under a broad range of base assumptions."

Butler added, "I have no doubt that we'll still have people say, 'Well, what if you did X, Y, or Z?' But hopefully being able to adjust the variables will help address some of those concerns, such as what we did."

According to Butler, CDC wanted to do a study on asymptomatic spread because "[u]nfortuantely, there continues to be some skepticism about the value of community-wide mitigation efforts for preventing transmission such as masking, distancing, and hand hygiene."

Except that the real-world data from millions of people throughout 2020 showed that lockdowns, social distancing, and hand hygiene had absolutely no effect on transmission despite near 100% compliance. And even among semi-official sites, the numbers are all over the place. Gunderson Health, without citing any source, says,

One of the questions I get most frequently is how many people develop symptoms and how many people remain asymptomatic. We believe that the number of asymptomatic infections ranges from 15 to 40 percent of total infections. COVID-19 causes a wide range of symptoms. Some have mild symptoms like a sore throat or a runny nose that can be confused for allergies or a cold. Others grow more ill and develop shortness of breath, pneumonia or require hospitalization. We don't know why some people never get sick, have only mild symptoms or require hospitalization.

It can be challenging to keep up with constantly changing information. We encourage you to visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). The recommendations are based on current science and updated regularly.

OK, but when I do web searches for CDC numbers, I get nothing but the vague, heavily qualified answers you see here after 18 months of the pandemic.

One of the formative experiences of my life cane early in my freshman year at an Ivy League school. I was told that due to my test scores, I could opt out of freshman comp. Something deep inside told me I shouldn't do this, I should sign up for the course. (This was the sort of thing that gave my parents fits.) My papers came back with red scribbles all over, "vague", "wrong word", "logic", "faulty parallel", and so forth. I'd been told I was a good writer, I should look into it as a career, and here, without having to do it, I'd taken this course and gotten a C-minus, which trashed my GPA. My parents were livid.

Meanwhile, pretty down over how the comp course had gone, I would read the campus paper each morning. The staff there were the real people who were going to go on to real journalism careers, the Jake Tappers, the Laura Ingrahams. They were already junior members of the elite. I would read their pieces and suddenly see the same stuff that came back to me with "vague", "wrong word", "logic", "faulty parallel". This threw me into something not quite depression, just something more like a crisis over how the world worked. The dean of freshmen, who liked me, was never able to help. He dropped dead of a heart attack anyhow.

It took me quite some time to realize this isn't a bug, it's a feature. I'd inadvertently learned there are two kinds of writers, those who actually write, and those who don't. It was an early lesson in the Ivy League and the elites and my place in them.

Fauci and Walensky are supposed to talk this way. They've been taught this from early youth.