covid spread increases -> hospitalizations go up - we both agree on this point
covid spread increases -> false positives increase due to more viral spread that will attack asymptomatic/immune individuals (we do know that other coronaviruses have cross immunity with cv19 so it's not uncommon to be asymptomatic due to preexisting immunity)
Ok, so it sounds like you're making the argument that a patient, who has COVID in their system, but is asymptomatic and tests positive would be considered a false positive, even though they can still spread the virus?
I wasn't even aware that there was doubt that asymptomatic spread was a thing. I realize now the issue - I believe that someone who has a COVID 19 infection, symptomatic or not, is someone infected with COVID 19, and you've decided that they aren't until they show symptoms. How do you feel about HIV?
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03141-3 https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/coronavirus-disease... https://www.advisory.com/en/daily-briefing/2021/01/11/asympt...
However, I am very familiar with the study you've linked. If you can even call it a study - it's more like a fantasy model based on the data of other studies the researchers appear to not even have read! They cite numbers from multiple papers that can't be found in those papers anywhere. There might not be a more embarrassing study I've read than this one.
There first citation to Lee et. al. claims the paper found 100% infectiousness of asymptomatic individuals, yes 100%. here's a quote from the actual paper
> Although the high viral load we observed in asymptomatic patients raises a distinct possibility of a risk for transmission, our study was not designed to determine this
(you'll note at nowhere in the paper is there anything resembling 100% spread in asymptomatic compared to symptomatic...this number is purely fabricated from thin air)
another citation from that paper is a citation to char et. al. that says the paper claims 40-140% infectiousness for asymptomatic individuals...again let's read the actual paper they cite
here's a quote from the paper
> In the household setting, symptomatic case-patients had 2.7 times the risk of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to their close contacts, compared with asymptomatic and presymptomatic case-patients
so the above paper deals with household settings and finds roughly 1/3 in a household setting...this paper very generously makes up numbers again to cite to this paper...embarrassing.
the cite mc evoy et. al. as having a finding of 40-70% which they got right! horray!
so 2/3 papers they use to determine their asymptomatic infectious number for their modeling are just garbage citations that don't resemble the findings of the source paper at all
this paper is worse than useless.
again, their model sets the infectiousness rate of asymptomatic individuals based on 3 citations - 2 of which are fabricated...garbage...utter garbage.
> No, I've never suggested "coincidence" with case counts and hospitalizations. It seems quite intuitive to me that false positives are happening at a similar rate as usual and more hospitalizations just means more false positives in the hospital. You get false positives with high CT - there have been multiple studies confirming this fact at this point, it's not a controversial statement as far as I'm aware.
But these positives come BEFORE the hospitalizations and deaths. I don't feel like you're understanding the order of events - high cases AND then hospitalizations after weeks. You keep describing events where people are retroactively proven to have COVID - this isn't the case. These are people who test positive and then later enter hospital.