Direct Measurement of Rates of Asymptomatic Infection and Clinical Care-Seeking for Seasonal Coronavirus

Jeffrey Shaman; Marta Galanti

We defined an infection (or viral) episode as a group of consecutive weekly specimens from a given individual that were positive for the same virus (allowing for a one-week gap to account for false negatives and temporary low shedding). Medically attended illness, sick days at home and medicine uptake were defined as episodes in which the participants reported seeking care, staying home or taking medicines due to respiratory symptoms. We classified all infection episodes as symptomatic or asymptomatic according to individual symptom scores in the days surrounding the date of the first positive swab of an episode. We used multiple definitions as a standard for symptomatic infection does not exist (Table 1) . These symptom definitions are described in reference . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.