The World Health Organization (WHO) has confirmed during a Monday 8th June 2020 media briefing that asymptomatic spread of the coronavirus is rare. In this article, you learn that there is a difference between pre-symptomatic and symptomatic people.
Maria Van Kerkhove, who heads the World Health Organization’s technical lead for coronavirus response, made the revelation in Geneva. Kerkhove also serves as the head of the emerging diseases and zoonoses unit for WHO.
This means that the conviction that people previously held concerning the virus is not entirely true. At the height of the pandemic, people observed social distancing regulations religiously because of fear of unknowingly spreading the virus or contracting it; because infected people have not started showing symptoms and have not undergone tests.
The most recent directive on this line of thought, from Maria Van Kerkhove, is as follows:
“From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual.
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“We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They’re following asymptomatic cases, they’re following contacts and they’re not finding secondary transmission onward. It is very rare — and much of that is not published in the literature.
“We are constantly looking at this data and we’re trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question. It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits onward.”
However, there are still arguments that even while an asymptomatic person may rarely spread the virus; infected people have been shown to spread the virus two or three days before their symptoms begin to appear.
According to a CNN article on coronavirus, Dr. Manisha Juthani, a specialist in infectious diseases mentioned that it is important for people to know the difference between pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic people.
Juthani explained that pre-symptomatic persons are in the early stages of an illness, that is, before symptoms have developed. Meanwhile, asymptomatic refers to having no symptoms throughout the course of an infection.
Thus, in simple terms: a person infected with coronavirus but does not show symptoms of illness is unlikely to spread it, while a person who shows illness symptoms could have started spreading the virus before the symptoms appear.
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