Never mind, World Health Organization officials said Tuesday … about what it said the day before.
At a briefing Monday, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s head of emerging diseases and zoonosis, said that people with the coronavirus but no symptoms aren’t driving the spread. A da🦋y later📖, she clarified that the science isn’t clear.
“From the data we have,” she explained the first🀅 day, “it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual. It’s very rare,” according to “a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing.”
After that got huge publicity as an apparent game-changer, she hedged the next day, “I did not say that asymptomatic cases cannot transmit; they can,” she said. “The question is, do they? And if they do,꧟ how often is tha🍸t happening?”
There’s a technical angle here, too: the difference between🌜 truly asymptomatic people (who never sh✨ow symptoms) and pre-symptomatic ones (who will, in a few days).
Bottom line: No top public-health experts should talk to the press unless they’re ready to avoid misunderstandings the first ꧑time. This kind of flip-flop only breeds paranoia.