X-Files
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"However, infection with SARS-CoV-2 usually doesn’t feel like a cold. Fewer than 20% of infected people who eventually show up at a hospital report having had a sore throat or runny nose. During the first few days of being infected, you’re more likely to have a fever, dry cough or, peculiarly, lose your sense of smell or taste.
Most likely, though, you won’t feel sick at all. When UCSF researchers tested people for SARS-CoV-2 in San Francisco’s Mission District, 53% of those infected never had any symptoms. “That’s much higher than expected,” says Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH, a UCSF professor of medicine with expertise in HIV. Surveys of outbreaks in nursing homes and prisons show similar or even higher numbers. “If we did a mass testing campaign on 300 million Americans right now, I think the rate of asymptomatic infection would be somewhere between 50% and 80% of cases,” Gandhi says. Millions of people may be spreading the virus without knowing it, she points out, making asymptomatic transmission the Achilles’ heel of efforts to control the pandemic – and highlighting the importance of universal masking.
https://www.ucsf.edu/magazine/covid-body
Most likely, though, you won’t feel sick at all. When UCSF researchers tested people for SARS-CoV-2 in San Francisco’s Mission District, 53% of those infected never had any symptoms. “That’s much higher than expected,” says Monica Gandhi, MD, MPH, a UCSF professor of medicine with expertise in HIV. Surveys of outbreaks in nursing homes and prisons show similar or even higher numbers. “If we did a mass testing campaign on 300 million Americans right now, I think the rate of asymptomatic infection would be somewhere between 50% and 80% of cases,” Gandhi says. Millions of people may be spreading the virus without knowing it, she points out, making asymptomatic transmission the Achilles’ heel of efforts to control the pandemic – and highlighting the importance of universal masking.
https://www.ucsf.edu/magazine/covid-body