‘Very rare’ for people with asymptomatic Covid-19 positive people to spread it – WHO

The World Health Organisation has deemed it rare for people who have asymptomatic Covid-19 to spread it.

Maria Van Kerkhove, PhD, WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead and an infectious disease epidemiologist, said June 8 at a news briefing from the agency’s Geneva headquarters:

From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual. 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.

This is massive news because until now it has been feared that a lot of the spread would come from people who were not showing any signs of illness.

Van Kerkhove went on to describe how the novel coronavirus, a respiratory pathogen, spreads through droplets, which can be released when someone coughs or sneezes.

She said:

It passes from an individual through infectious droplets. If we actually followed all of the symptomatic cases, isolated those cases, followed the contacts and quarantined those cases, we would drastically reduce — I would love to be able to give a proportion of how much transmission we would actually stop — but it would be a drastic reduction in transmission,

Van Kerkhove says asymptomatic cases turn out to be cases of mild disease