Originally posted on Quora May 24, 2023
“The Experts TM” have been caught misleading the public with purely mathematical models of transmission. The PCR test cannot predict infectiousness and thus the underlying assumption that asymptomatic cases were just as infectious or the source of most infections, and the corresponding mandates, was false because the tests can also detect fragments of noninfectious genetic material. In 2020, a Stanford research team did develop a test to detect the presence of a minus strand that would allow replication, and thus make the case infectious. The same research team use their test to study the rate at which infected people without symptoms infected others between July of 2020 and April of 2022 and found that only 4% of asymptomatic cases were infectious with no more than 25% of asymptomatic cases being infectious during the omicron wave when the majority of all cases were asymptomatic
A systematic review of 130 studies, published in PLOS Medicine, found that people with asymptomatic infections, which constitutes 14–50% of estimated infections, are 68% less likely to infect others than people with symptomatic infections. This systematic review adds to the evidence that the underlying assumption that asymptomatic people are just as contagious and “silent spreaders” is bullshit.