Quote:
Originally Posted by staylor26
Yea I know. It’s really ****ing weird.
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I think it's more a function of introduction and density. We know it was introduced into that nursing home in Washington (a place with at-risk people in a densely populated environment) and that it ravaged it. We can see what is happening in New York. Many countries in the EU are densely populated and it's spreading at exponential rates.
We also can't assume that a lack of symptoms right now means a lack of cases, given a variable incubation period of days to weeks. There is just too little that we know right now, unfortunately.
The only thing I can compare it to is AIDS. By the time the first cases were identified, 250,000 people already had HIV. Although I think the initial response to AIDS was a national failure, there was also no way that it was going to be stopped. Fortunately, HIV was much harder to transmit. Unfortunately, its long latency period meant that people were infected for years while transmitting the virus to others because they were largely asymptomatic. We need to try and learn from that.
Asymptomatic carriers will spread SARS-CoV-2. Even if they aren't affected or a high-risk group, they're a risk to everyone they come in contact with, and because they're asymptomatic, we don't know who they are. That's why we need to limit interaction as much as possible.