#COVID19 There's been a lot of talk about "asymptomatic" #SARSCoV2 #coronavirus patients and transmission. But a lot of people (including myself) don't always have a good idea of what that means.

Obviously "asymptomatic" on it's own means "without symptoms," but to understand why that's so tricky it's critical to know that symptoms are disease features that are reported largely by patients.

Patients are notorious for being wrong. This is not to say that doctors are always right or that patients are deliberately wrong, but it's hard to rely on extremely minor self-reported symptoms like a runny nose, a cough, or a sneeze to determine whether someone is "symptomatic"