The truth about the ‘silent’ Covid carriers
Even if you don’t have any symptoms, you could still have Covid-19 and be a ‘silent,’ and potentially deadly, spreader of the disease. The specter of the asymptomatic carrier—the frightening idea that nobody is safe—has become one of the key drivers of lockdown and social distancing policies.
When the SARS-CoV-2 virus was first detected, health agencies were told up to 80 percent of infected people could be asymptomatic, although that estimate has now fallen to around a third.
But independent researchers have discovered two big problems with the asymptomatic carrier phenomenon: even the more conservative estimate of cases is still far too high, and your chances of getting the disease from a silent spreader are much lower than from someone with obvious symptoms such as coughing and sneezing.
Researchers at the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare at Bond University in Australia estimate that the true level of asymptomatic cases is around 17 percent—around half the current official figures—although some of the 13 studies they analyzed had the figure as
