Reacción a "Reaction to study claiming that asymptomatic people are less contagious with covid-19"

The use of systematic reviews and meta-analyses is of particular interest in a public health crisis, where research is sometimes very limited in sample size, and reproducibility of studies is sometimes difficult.

In this review they find that asymptomatic people are less likely to be contagious than people with symptoms, which may be consistent with other studies.

However, the results of this review and meta-analysis should be interpreted with extreme caution, as the included studies are very different from each other because:

(1) They use very different definitions of what an asymptomatic is.

(2) An asymptomatic person at the beginning of the pandemic (due to test availability) is not the same as an asymptomatic person in the later stages of the pandemic with a high proportion of the population vaccinated. This fact makes the estimates made in the meta-analysis difficult to interpret.