Whew! I’m gonna need the World Health Organization to get it together because its tune has been changing quite a bit! According to WHO officials, coronavirus patients without symptoms aren’t the ones driving the spread of the virus, according to CNBC.
Some people, particularly young and otherwise healthy individuals, who are infected by the coronavirus never develop symptoms or only show mild symptoms while others might not develop symptoms until days after they were actually infected.
Preliminary evidence from the earliest outbreaks indicated that the virus could spread from person-to-person contact, even if the carrier didn’t show any symptoms. But now, WHO officials say that while asymptomatic spread can occur, it is not the main way the virus is being transmitted.
“From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, said at a news briefing from the United Nations agency’s Geneva headquarters. “It’s very rare.”
Van Kerkhove says government responses should focus on detecting and isolating infected people with symptoms, and tracking anyone who might have come into contact with them.
More research and data are needed to “truly answer” the question of whether the coronavirus can spread on a wide scale through asymptomatic carriers, Van Kerkhove added.
“We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing,” she said. “They’re following asymptomatic cases. They’re following contacts. And they’re not finding secondary transmission onward. It’s very rare.”
“What we really want to be focused on is following the symptomatic cases,” Van Kerkhove said. “If we actually followed all of the symptomatic cases, isolated those cases, followed the contacts and quarantined those contacts, we would drastically reduce” the outbreak.
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