Fragments of data about the real world ,displayed on Twitter, that speak to largely unrecognised wider risks of COVID-19 infection.

The implications - collateral and undetected damage from #COVID-19 may be can be more that recognised by crude death rate; seeming healthy younger people are a mortal danger to the vulnerable.

First:
near Bergamo, Italy the surge in deaths was much greater than the recorded COVID-19 deaths.

(H/T John Cairns on Twitter)

Second point:

extensive testing in Iceland shows many more young people are testing positive than surveys of symptomatic people, as in the Netherlands would suggest.(H/T A. Afonso on Twitter)

Serious questions are raised by these observations

Asymptomatic carriers may be widely missed and spread disease?
Many deaths caused by the virus are being missed?

Update

Third:

Covid-19:identifying and isolating asymptomatic people helped eliminate virus in Italianvillage

BMJ 2020; 368 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m1165 (Published 23 March 2020)Cite this as: BMJ 2020;368:m1165

An Italian academic has claimed striking evidence that most people infected with covid-19 show no symptoms but are still able to infect others, which he says has huge implications for testing policy, particularly in hospitals.

Sergio Romagnani, a professor of clinical immunology at the University of Florence, has reported how blanket testing in a completely isolated village of roughly 3000 people in northern Italy saw the number of people with covid-19 symptoms fall by over 90% within 10 days.

Vo’Euganeo, 50 km west of Venice, was closed off by authorities in mid-February, at which point repeat RNA testing of the entire population began. All those with positive tests were quarantined. The number of people sick from covid-19 fell from 88 to seven in less than 10 days, Romagnani reported.

In an open letter to the authorities in the Tuscany region,1 Romagnani wrote that the great majority of people infected with covid-19—50-75%—were asymptomatic, but represented “a formidable source” of contagion.

“The percentage of people infected, even if asymptomatic, in the population is very high and represents the majority of cases, particularly, but not only, among young people. Isolation of asymptomatics is essential for controlling the spread of the virus and the seriousness of the epidemic,” he said...

Fourth:

Iceland’s testing suggests 50% of COVID-19 cases are asymptomatic
The small nation might have an important lesson about the pandemic.
“Iceland’s population puts it in the unique position of having very high testing capabilities with help from the Icelandic medical research company deCode Genetics, who are offering to perform large scale testing,” Thorolfur Guðnason, Iceland’s chief epidemiologist, told BuzzFeed News. “This effort is intended to gather insight into the actual prevalence of the virus in the community, as most countries are most exclusively testing symptomatic individuals at this time.” Not all the results from Iceland’s tests have come through yet, but the ones that have, show that half of all cases are asymptomatic (at the time of testing).

This would suggest that, on one hand, the virus is not as dangerous as we thought, but on the other hand, it would also suggest that it has spread far more than we are currently aware of. These results are also indicated by a testing survey carried on an entire Italian town of Vo (population 3,300), where the results showed that more than 50% of all cases are asymptomatic. The whole population of the village was tested, and 3% of the residents tested positive. Then, after a two-week lockdown, the population was tested again. The transmission had been reduced by 90% and the results were confirmed: the majority of cases seem to be asymptomatic...

Fifth:

Early Spread of SARS-Cov-2 in the Icelandic Population

SARS-CoV-2 has spread widely in the Icelandic population outside of the high-risk groups targeted for testing by the healthcare system. Several different strains of the virus cause these infections and the composition of known infections in Iceland changed rapidly. Children and females are less vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 than adults and males. Hence, to contain the pandemic we must increase the scope of the testing.

Sixth:

Using the 'excess mortality' approach we find evidence that 2-3x as many people are dying of COVID-19 as are officially being registered.

@robertwiblin On Twitter