COVID-19 has been around since back in December 2019, when rumours of a little known pneumonia were afflicting residents in Wuhan, China.
Since then, various false information and speculations have since engulfed the novel coronavirus and has proliferated through social media.
Among them is the belief that the coronavirus can be spread by someone with no symptoms of the disease. As of now with the current information we have, there is still no proof to back that up.
NCID Says There’s Still No Proof That COVID-19 Can be Spread from People Without Symptoms
Dr Shawn Vasoo, the clinical director of the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID) has said it once and hopefully for the last time that there is “no robust proof” that the coronavirus can be spread by someone with no symptoms of the disease.
A letter in the New England Journal of Medicine on 30 January has been proven to be wrong.
The letter from the University Hospital of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munch had claimed that a German businessman had caught the infection from a Chinese woman that he had met when she was in Germany.
However, they claimed that the woman had only become sick when she was on board her flight home to Shanghai and was only later discovered to be infected with COVID-19.
Unsurprisingly, people became afraid that the virus could indeed be spread without symptoms, which would make it even harder to detect and stop.
Wrong Info Led to Wrong Speculation
However, as it turns out, doctors had not spoken to the woman earlier and they had taken the German man’s word that she had been well when they met up.
In an interview in Shanghai, the woman revealed that she had indeed been sick when she was in Germany.
There is however one other case which includes a letter in the Journal Of The American Medical Association on 21 February by a team of doctors from China where a family member was “presumed” asymptomatic and might have infected other family members.
However, Dr Vasoo says that this case is not clear as medical experts were not sure whether the patient in question had infected the others, or was infected by them.
It was presumed that she was the source of the infection only because she had travelled to Wuhan.
To sum it all up, Dr Vasoo believes that thus far, “transmission is predominantly still through symptomatic persons.”
He also said, “While it is plausible that viral diseases may transmit in varying degrees and durations in the pre-symptomatic phase, we do not have robust data that it happens or to what extent it is for Covid-19.
“But I think apart from that case report, we don’t really have much information about the circumstances in which it occurred.”
So don’t panic; just live your life as per usual, and drink more milk. Milk is always goody.
