Every day, Le Parisien takes action to answer your questions about the coronavirus. Today we are interested in the questioning of Ndiaye, who wonders if we can be reached from Covid-19 without knowing it.
The answer is yes, for two reasons. On the one hand, many people infected with the coronavirus have little or no symptoms (fever, cough, breathing difficulties, in particular). It is estimated that these asymptomatic patients represent "30 to 60% of infected subjects", according to the Institut Pasteur. In early March, the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, had put forward a proportion of "80% of people do not have or have few symptoms".
As an example, take the liner Diamond Princess, a huge cruise liner immobilized in Japan in February and whose entire crew and passengers had been screened. "40% of people positive for Covid-19 were asymptomatic or with mild symptoms," notes epidemiologist Antoine Flahault, professor of public health at the University of Geneva. In other words, they did not realize they were affected before being tested.
According to results from more than 80,000 infected patients in China - and released by the country's authorities on April 1 - around 1.7% of the total had absolutely no symptoms.
“Rise in power” of the number of tests in France
It is however impossible to obtain a precise idea of the number of asymptomatic patients in France, for lack of having carried out a generalized screening for the whole population. Only individuals with severe symptoms were tested at the start of the epidemic, which represents 101,046 samples until March 24, according to the latest epidemiological bulletin from Public Health France.
The device should "ramp up" from this month of April, according to the government which aims "30,000 additional tests per day in April, 60,000 per day in May and more than 100,000 per day in June".
On the other hand, you may have been infected with Covid-19 but still be in the incubation period. This is the time between the time of infection and the onset of the first symptoms. For the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, the incubation period varies from three days to two weeks. "For 90% of patients, it goes from four to nine days", judges a former head of the infectious diseases department in a Parisian hospital.
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