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Take away: The claim here is ultimately a value judgement, but the data used to support the claim is subject to examination. Overall the source for the presented data was not identifiable and the overall argument requires greater context to evaluate.

The claim: Students are harmed more by not being in school/sports than by COVID-19.

The evidence: The claim is supported by a single data table. Unfortunately, the source for the table presented was not found. It is well documented that the infection fatality rate in age groups 15-24 is lower than for older age groups, however the actual infection fatality rate for this age group is still not entirely clear. As one example, the CDC website has two data sets to estimate COVID-19 deaths. One is provisional COVID-19 deaths with 242 deaths reported in the age group 15-24 in the entire United States. The second dataset estimates COVID-19 deaths based on the increase over the number of expected deaths based on historical data. The second dataset does not present data for 15-24 age group, only "under 25 years." The lower range of the second dataset is ~10,000 deaths in people under 25 years in Florida above the expected deaths for the year. These deaths may be attributed to COVID-19.

Regardless, no data is presented which measures how students are harmed by not being in school. Additional data needs to be presented for the claim to be validated including measurable metrics by which students are harmed. These are not presented in the Twitter post.

Sources: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#dashboard https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-by-Sex-Age-and-S/9bhg-hcku/data https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/96dd742462124fa0b38ddedb9b25e429 https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/need-extra-precautions/older-adults.html#:~:text=As%20you%20get%20older%2C%20your,than%20people%20in%20their%2050s.

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The takeaway: Reported numbers of asymptomatic individuals are discordant but generally are less than 20% of reported cases.

The claim: Half of people infected with COVID-19 are asymptomatic.

The evidence: 17.9% of the Diamond Princess ship were asymptomatic (1). Only 48 out of 473 total cases were from asymptomatic individuals in Iceland (2). The initial analysis of China's asymptomatic cases was 1% (3). A research article summarizing data from China and Italy lists China's asymptomatic cases as 80.9% and Italy's asymptomatic cases as 8.5% (4). It appears that mild symptoms and asymptomatic cases were combined in reference 4 for China's data as mild symptom numbers were N/A.

Therefore, there is no consensus on the number of asymptomatic individuals. Additional clarity is needed in the data before conclusions can be made based on the number of asymptomatic individuals.

Sources:

1 https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.10.2000180

2 https://www.government.is/news/article/2020/03/15/Large-scale-testing-of-general-population-in-Iceland-underway/

3 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762130

4 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7278221/

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