Delaware Army National Guard Pfc. Kelly Buterbaugh gives instructions to a motorist during a drive-thru coronavirus testing mission at the University of Delaware’s Science, Technology and Advanced Research Campus in Newark, Delaware, May 29, 2020. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Capt. Brendan Mackie)
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.
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“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.
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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.
