CORRECTION: In light of confusion over “asymptomatic” versus “pre-symptomatic” transmission, World Health Organization officials on Tuesday walked back the statements below that it made made in a Monday news conference after being criticized by numerous epidemiologists. Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, in charge of the WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, said Tuesday that asymptomatic spread is a “really complex question” with many unknown factors. “We don’t actually have that answer yet,” she said.
“I was responding to a question at the press conference. I wasn’t stating a policy of WHO or anything like that. I was just trying to articulate what we know,” Van Kerkhove said. “And in that, I used the phrase ‘very rare,’ and I think that that’s misunderstanding to state that asymptomatic transmission globally is very rare. I was referring to a small subset of studies.”
“The majority of transmission that we know about is that people who have symptoms transmit the virus to other people through infectious droplets,” she added. “But there are a subset of people who don’t develop symptoms, and to truly understand how many people don’t have symptoms, we don’t actually have that answer yet.”
WND published a followup article Tuesday that clarified the remarks, titled: WHO retreats from its own claim asymptomatic spread is ‘very rare’
WND’s original headline for the Monday story below was: NOW you tell us: WHO finds ‘asymptomatic’ carriers not spreading coronavirus
To help clarify the matter, the headline on WND’s Monday story has now been corrected to: WHO comments on virus spread among people who don’t initially show symptoms
Below is WND’s original story published Monday:
The conventional wisdom is that the novel coronavirus is difficult to contain because of its spread by infected people who don’t show symptoms.
The assumption has been at the heart of the highly consequential lockdown policies, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention citing the “potential for presymptomatic transmission” as a reason for social distancing.
But now World Health Organization officials are casting doubt on that belief, finding that while asymptomatic spread can occur, it is not the main way the virus is being transmitted, reports CNBC.
“From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual,” said Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit.
“It’s very rare,” she said Tuesday at a news briefing at the United Nations agency’s Geneva headquarters.
She urged governments to focus on detecting and isolating infected people with symptoms and tracking anyone they contact.
Van Kerkhove said more data is need to be certain about whether or not the coronavirus can spread widely through asymptomatic carriers.
But researchers around the world who are tracing contacts “are not finding secondary transmission” by asymptomatic carriers.
Van Kerkhove said the new finding has important implications for how to limit the spread of the coronavirus, which has infected more than 7 million worldwide and killed more than 400,000.
“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.
That was the strategy undertaken by South Korea, which has been credited with successfully containing the virus while keeping businesses open.
