WHO Official Clarifies Remarks On “Rare” Spread Of COVID-19 From Asymptomatic Patients

by mcardinal

By Samuel Case, FISM News

On Monday during a Q&A session the WHO’s technical lead on the coronavirus pandemic, Maria Van Kerhove, remarked that COVID-19 may not spread easily from asymptomatic patients based on available data from contact tracing. Van Kerhove said, “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,”. 

On Tuesday, after having received pushback from experts in the medical community Van Kerhove clarified her comments in another Q&A, saying “What I was referring to yesterday in the press conference were very few studies — some two or three studies that had been published that actually try to follow asymptomatic cases, so people who are infected, over time, and then look at all of their contacts and see how many additional people were infected”. She continued, “And that’s a very small subset of studies. So I was responding to a question at the press conference. I wasn’t stating a policy of WHO or anything like that,”.

Sourced from Reuters, CNN, Statnews

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