I’m uncertain why this recent research report from Scripps hasn’t been more widely disseminated and why it hasn’t been scaring the crap out of folks who aren’t worried because “even if I do get exposed, it is likely I’ll get an asymptomatic case and be fine”. Well, maybe not...
SAN DIEGO — A new report from Scripps Research finds that up to half of all people infected with COVID-19 show no symptoms, and many of them could have lung damage without realizing it.
The Scripps Research report was trying to understand how people without symptoms can spread coronavirus, but researchers made a startling discovery.
“Three studies that I’ve looked at studied asymptomatic people. Interestingly, all the people look and feel fine, but when researchers did a CT scan doing an image of their lungs, in 50 to 100% of the cases, they actually found abnormalities,” said Daniel Oran, of Scripps Research. “When they look at these CT scans, it’s hazy — looks like you’re looking through a dirty piece of glass. What that means is there’s something abnormal about the lungs.”
Also, from another news report on this study:
Coronavirus patients without any symptoms can still suffer organ damage - often silently - a new study suggests.
Researchers analyzing public datasets found that as many as 45 percent of people infected with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, never have traditional signs such as coughing, fever or shortness of breath.
What's more, in one of the datasets, more than half of asymptomatic patients had CT scans with signs of serious lung damage.
Mask wearing in public should be mandatory across the entire US. Instead of downplaying the disease and making it out to be not such a big deal for most people, our entire government from all levels of federal, state and local officials should all be scaring the crap out of folks about how much we don’t know about this virus and disease.
We know some more than we did a few months ago, but in the grand scheme of things, we still are fumbling our way in the dark on this virus. It is irresponsible to be giving the public false assurances at this point. A lot of people could be silently experiencing chronic lung damage.
Here are links to the original Scripps Research article in “Annals of Internal Medicine”:
Article && PDF
(thanks to user FoggyDew for the links and suggestion to add them)