> " their health was totally normal." -- Wei Yang Fu, Et al.

> Many of the people who tested positive for the virus 
> didn't know it they had it because they showed no 
> symptoms. The findings add to a growing body of 
> evidence suggesting that people who don't feel sick 
> are contributing to the spread of the deadly virus 
> that has swept the world. -- CNN, Et al.

A personal anecdote - in early Feb, before the symptom was reported as
indicative of Covid-19, Joanne (my wife, who keeps 2 hives of her own atop a
very baroque Manhattan co-op that I call "The Church of Capital Gains") had
what we thought was a bad cold or sinus infection. Our doctor declined to
diagnose it as an actual sinus infection via a video appointment.  It
dragged on for several weeks.

She lost her sense of taste and smell for a bit, which seemed very strange,
but this was before this symptom was reported as being a Covid-19 symptom.
We had fled the City for "down the shore" in NJ, so we were lounging about
within arm's reach  of each other much more than usual, but I had zero
symptoms.  There is simply no way I avoided being exposed, but I had no
complaints at all, not one sneeze, not one cough.  I was "perfectly
healthy". Still am, knock on wood. Never felt better.


>> You can't take a sample of 5000 people of any sort 
>> and say "their health was totally normal."

In regards to the sometimes fatal disease at hand, you might, as one is not
speaking of any non-respiratory symptoms or ailments.

But language also matters here.  Let's assume that the paper was drafted or
thought out in Mandarin (Mandarin literally means, “speech of officials”,
after all) and then translated to English.

My grasp is very limited, and I still struggle dealing with the aggravation
of the shades of meaning between things like:

"Wán quán zhèng cháng" vs "Wán wán quán quán zhèng cháng"

In English, "Perfectly normal" vs "Completely normal".

But see the natural emphasis of the repeated "wán" and "quán" in the second
example?  That's not just "completely", it emphasizes more than that.  

An easier example is "fú", which can mean "bat", but more often is used as
"good fortune" or "luck".  One will often hear/see "fú- fú", literally
wishing one "doubly good fortune", and one will see (written) a string of
FIVE "fú"s in a row, which is the "Five Blessings" (health, riches, a long
life, love of virtue, and a natural death).

So, if they really meant "absolutely normal in all ways", then they likely
would have written the English equivalent of "absolutely, positively", which
would never have survived the first edit pass by any English editor, as no
one makes unconditional superlative statements in a letter to a refereed
journal unless one is playing the part of the scientist that everyone
ignores in the beginning of all sci-fi monster movies.

So, maybe cut 'em some slack.

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