*So here we all are under house arrest, with healthy people quarantined,
and, when they creep out*
*into the desolated world, ordered to wear masks and stay six feet
apart—all because of a botched *
*"study" that **was expertly refuted three months ago.*
*This is beyond outrageous. How many people have now died, or will die in
this new Great **Depression, *
*because of that junk science? *
*And—even more important—what will it now take to make this known? Since Il
Fauci surely won't retract*
*retract his ringing affirmation of that work ("This study lays the
question [of asymptomatic transmission]*
*to rest"] "our free press" **won't report it, nor are the proprietors of
"social media" likely to enable, or allow, *
*its circulation.*
*So it is up to us, we angry few, to spread the word. Please send this
email far and wide.*
*MCM*
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Germans repatriated from Wuhan, China, arrive at an army barracks on 1
February to be examined for signs of infection with the new coronavirus.
FRANK RUMPENHORST/PICTURE-ALLIANCE/DPA/AP IMAGES
Study claiming new coronavirus can be transmitted by people without
symptoms was flawed
By Kai Kupferschmidt <https://www.sciencemag.org/author/kai-kupferschmidt>Feb.
3, 2020 , 5:30 PM
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/paper-non-symptomatic-patient-transmitting-coronavirus-wrong
A paper published on 30 January
<https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2001468> in The New England
Journal of Medicine (NEJM) about the first four people in Germany infected
with a novel coronavirus made many headlines because it seemed to confirm
what public health experts feared: that someone who has no symptoms from
infection with the virus, named 2019-nCoV, can still transmit it to others.
That might make controlling the virus much harder.
Chinese researchers had previously suggested asymptomatic people might
transmit the virus but had not presented clear-cut evidence. “There’s no
doubt after reading [the NEJM] paper that asymptomatic transmission is
occurring,” Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told journalists. “This study lays the
question to rest.”
But now, it turns out that information was wrong. The Robert Koch Institute
(RKI), the German government’s public health agency, has written a letter
to NEJM to set the record straight, even though it was not involved in the
paper.
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The letter in *NEJM* described a cluster of infections that began after a
businesswoman from Shanghai visited a company near Munich on 20 and 21
January, where she had a meeting with the first of four people who later
fell ill. Crucially, she wasn’t sick at the time: “During her stay, she had
been well with no sign or symptoms of infection but had become ill on her
flight back to China,” the authors wrote. “The fact that asymptomatic
persons are potential sources of 2019-nCoV infection may warrant a
reassessment of transmission dynamics of the current outbreak.”
But the researchers didn’t actually speak to the woman before they
published the paper. The last author, Michael Hoelscher of the Ludwig
Maximilian University of Munich Medical Center, says the paper relied on
information from the four other patients: “They told us that the patient
from China did not appear to have any symptoms.” Afterward, however, RKI
and the Health and Food Safety Authority of the state of Bavaria did talk
to the Shanghai patient on the phone, and it turned out she did have
symptoms while in Germany. According to people familiar with the call, she
felt tired, suffered from muscle pain, and took paracetamol, a
fever-lowering medication. (An RKI spokesperson would only confirm to
Science that the woman had symptoms.)
Hoelscher was not on the call, he says. “I asked the Bavarian Health and
Food Safety Authority whether the information from that phone conversation
called for a correction and I was told that is not the case,” he says. (The
Bavarian ministry of health, of which the agency is part, has not responded
to a request for information from ScienceInsider.) But RKI disagreed. The
agency’s spokesperson confirms that a letter about the error has been
submitted to NEJM. RKI also informed the World Health Organization (WHO)
and European partner agencies about the new information.
“I feel bad about how this went, but I don’t think anybody is at fault
here,” says virologist Christian Drosten of the Charité University Hospital
in Berlin, who did the lab work for the study and is one of its authors.
“Apparently the woman could not be reached at first and people felt this
had to be communicated quickly.”
Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public
Health, says calling a case asymptomatic without talking to the person is
problematic. “In retrospect, it sounds like this was a poor choice,” he
says. However, “In an emergency setting, it’s often not possible to talk to
all the people,” he adds. “I’m assuming that this was an overstretched
group trying to get out their best idea of what the truth was quickly
rather than somebody trying to be careless.”
The Public Health Agency of Sweden reacted less charitably. “The sources
that claimed that the coronavirus would infect during the incubation period
lack scientific support for this analysis in their articles,” says a
document with frequently asked questions the agency posted on its website
yesterday
<https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/smittskydd-beredskap/smittsamma-sjukdomar/coronavirus/fragor-och-svar-om-nytt-coronavirus/>.
“This applies, among other things, to an article in [NEJM] that has
subsequently proven to contain major flaws and errors.” Even if the
patient’s symptoms were unspecific, it wasn’t an asymptomatic infection,
says Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of
Toronto. “Asymptomatic means no symptoms, zero. It means you feel fine. We
have to be careful with our words.”
Hoelscher agrees that the paper should have been clearer about the origin
of the information about the woman’s health. “If I was writing this today,
I would phrase that differently,” he says. The need to share information as
fast as possible, along with NEJM’s push to publish early, created a lot of
pressure, he says.
*Click on the link for the rest.*
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