WHO Official Walks Back Comments On Asymptomatic Transmission Being 'Very Rare', Says Much Is Still Not Known

In a video posted on Twitter , Kerkhove, later said that she was referring to a small subset of studies and unpublished information from member states when making the comments.

New Delhi: Hours after the World Health Organization suggested that transmission of Coronavirus by asymptomatic patients is a rare case, the global health body issued clarification and said that scientists have not yet found out how frequently people with asymptomatic cases of Covid-19 can transmit the infection to others.

Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead, made the statement about asymptomatic transmission being a rare thing, at a briefing in Geneva, where officials from the global health agency said that new coronavirus cases had their biggest daily increase ever and countries must continue with efforts to contain the virus.

She had said at the briefing that many countries doing contact tracing had identified asymptomatic cases but were not finding that they caused further spread of the virus.Governments should instead focus their efforts on detecting and isolating infected people with symptoms — then tracking anyone who might have come into contact with them.  “What we really want to be focused on is following the symptomatic cases.”

In a video posted on Twitter, she later said that she was referring to a small subset of studies and unpublished information from member states when making the comments. “I wasn’t stating a policy of WHO or anything like that, I was just trying to articulate what we know,” she said.


She said that it would be a misunderstanding to state that asymptomatic transmission globally is very rare.


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