Coronavirus | What role do people without symptoms play in spreading COVID-19?
The HinduThe story so far: On June 8, the technical lead of the World Health Organisation, on the COVID-19 pandemic, said transmission by people without symptoms is “very rare”. On Monday, June 8, at a virtual press conference, Dr. Maria van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on the COVID-19 pandemic, said in response to a question by a journalist, that current evidence seemed to suggest that many countries monitoring asymptomatic cases and their contacts were not finding enough evidence to suggest that they were actually transmitting the disease. What we really want to be focused on is following he symptomatic cases.” These comments provoked opposition from infectious disease experts and doctors — primarily on social media — arguing that Dr. Kerkhove may have downplayed the significance of this mode of transmission. However, she maintained that significant disease spread by asymptomatics was the result of “modelling studies”, meaning they were not based on real world observations or properly vetted by peer-reviewed studies.