"The day we let Covid-19 spin out of control"

Compelling piece in STAT on COVID-19:

Jan. 24 marks the one-year anniversary of a momentous but largely unnoticed event in the history of the Covid-19 pandemic: the first published report of an individual infected with the novel coronavirus who never developed symptoms. This early confirmation of asymptomatic infection should have set off alarm bells and profoundly altered our response to the gathering storm. But it did not. One year later we are still paying the price for this catastrophic blunder.

Chilling. Even Fauci got it wrong:

On Jan. 28, 2020, [Fauci] said, “In all the history of respiratory-borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. … Even if there’s a rare asymptomatic person that might transmit, an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers.”

But he also corrected:

To his credit, Fauci was among those who immediately criticized this remark. Based on epidemiological data that had become available since his earlier comments, he said it was “not correct” to characterize asymptomatic transmission as rare.

https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/23/asymptomatic-infection-blunder-covid-19-spin-out-of-control/