WHO: Asymptomatic Spread Of Coronavirus Appears To Be ‘Very Rare’

Earlier, health officials warned that asymptomatic carriers could be fueling the spread but Van Kerkhove said that while asymptomatic spread can occur, it is not the main way the virus was being transmitted.

Getty Images

New Delhi:  The World Health Organisation made a significant new claim on Monday and said that people with the Sars-Cov-2 may not be infectious if they are ‘asymptomatic'. WHO official epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove made the statement 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. In an online briefing WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual." Van Kerkhove said 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", she said. “What we really want to be focused on is following the symptomatic cases,” Van Kerkhove said. She added that the agency is still trying to get “more information” from different countries to “truly answer” whether the virus can spread widely through asymptomatic carriers. “If we actually followed all of the symptomatic cases, isolated those cases, followed the contacts, and quarantined those contacts, it would be a drastic reduction in transmission,” she said. Also watch|Rare that asymptomatic patients actually transmit the virus: WHO