This is big news, if true. And it suggests that people need to take these social distancing exhortations a whole lot more seriously. That would include the President of the United States who insists that he’s feeling fine so there’s no need to worry about the fact that he’s been in close quarters with a bunch of people who have contracted the virus and is possibly spreading it to his entire cabinet and the coronavirus task force all day long.
For all we know, he’s Patient Zero for half the leaders in the world.
New studies in several countries and a large coronavirus outbreak in Massachusetts bring into question reassuring assertions by US officials about the way the novel virus spreads.
These officials have emphasized that the virus is spread mainly by people who are already showing symptoms, such as fever, cough or difficulty breathing. If that’s true, it’s good news, since people who are obviously ill can be identified and isolated, making it easier to control an outbreak.
But it appears that a Massachusetts coronavirus cluster with at least 82 cases was started by people who were not yet showing symptoms, and more than half a dozen studies have shown that people without symptoms are causing substantial amounts of infection.
For weeks, federal officials have emphasized that asymptomatic transmission can happen, but have said that it’s not a significant factor in the spread of the virus.
On March 1 on ABC’s This Week, US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar told host George Stephanopoulos that asymptomatic spread is “not the major driver” of the spread of the new coronavirus.
“You really need to just focus on the individuals that are symptomatic,” he said. “It [the containment strategy] really does depend on symptomatic presentation.”
The website for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention echoes that assessment.Several experts interviewed by CNN said while it’s unclear exactly what percentage of the transmission in the outbreak is fueled by people who are obviously sick versus those who have no symptoms or very mild symptoms, it’s become clear that transmission by people who are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic is responsible for more transmission than previously thought.
“We now know that asymptomatic transmission likely [plays] an important role in spreading this virus,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Osterholm added that it’s “absolutely clear” that asymptomatic infection “surely can fuel a pandemic like this in a way that’s going to make it very difficult to control.”
In an article two weeks ago in the New England Journal of Medicine, Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, expressed concern about the spread of the disease by people who haven’t yet developed symptoms, or who are only a bit sick.
“There is also strong evidence that it can be transmitted by people who are just mildly ill or even presymptomatic. That means COVID-19 will be much harder to contain than the Middle East respiratory syndrome or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which were spread much less efficiently and only by symptomatic people,” he wrote, using the scientific word for the disease caused by the virus.
Others agree that people without serious symptoms play a substantial role in the spread of the new coronavirus.
“Asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic transmission are a major factor in transmission for Covid-19,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and longtime adviser to the CDC. “They’re going to be the drivers of spread in the community.”
Osterholm urged public officials to be clearer about the way the virus is spread.
“At the very beginning of the outbreak, we had many questions about how transmission of this virus occurred. And unfortunately, we saw a number of people taking very firm stances about it was happening this way or it wasn’t happening this way. And as we have continued to learn how transmission occurs with this outbreak, it is clear that many of those early statements were not correct,” he said.
I know there’s a great temptation among people who are not in the highest risk groups to blow this off and not take it as seriously. But that’s a bad idea. Even if you aren’t showing symptoms you might be passing the virus around to everyone you come in contact with and they can be exposing other people as well.
And if this is true, it opens up a whole new window into this thing:
