Just a day after World Health Organization (WHO) officials made headlines by stating that an asymptomatic person with COVID-19 transmitting the virus onward to a secondary individual is a rare occurrence, the agency walked back its comments on Tuesday.
It’s been a puzzling 24 hours for patients, physicians, and others who were struggling to dissect the WHO’s comments on Monday, which appeared to significantly contradict previous COVID19 research. According to a report from CNBC, Maria Van Kerkhove, Ph.D., head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, while speaking at news briefing from the United Nations agency’s Geneva headquarters yesterday, stated, “From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual. It’s very rare.”
While Van Kerkhove added that more research and data will be needed to truly answer the question of if the virus can spread widely through asymptomatic carriers, but for now, government responses should focus on detecting and isolating infected people with symptoms, and tracking anyone who might have come into contact with them, according to CNBC.
Following Van Kerkhove’s comments, several healthcare stakeholders and leaders were quick to point out they were shocked the WHO would make this claim, given what scientists and experts have found so far related to asymptomatic transmission. In one insightful Twitter thread, Andy Slavitt, former CMS Acting Administrator in the Obama Administration, called the WHO’s statement “irresponsible,” despite being based on legitimate observations. Slavitt, who said he spoke with the WHO and other medical experts yesterday, revealed that the agency had a “relatively small amount of contact tracing work in China where they found most people claimed to have gotten sick from someone who had symptoms.”
Slavitt also referenced multiple other studies contradicting the WHO’s statement, with evidence showing it can be common for the virus to transmit from individuals who are either pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic. One commonly referenced study from the Annals of Internal Medicine revealed “Asymptomatic persons seem to account for approximately 40% to 45% of SARS-CoV-2 infections, and they can transmit the virus to others for an extended period, perhaps longer than 14 days.”
Slavitt, in his Twitter thread, and Eric Topol, M.D., founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, in a separate one, both pointed out that pre-symptomatic—meaning individuals who are infected, haven’t developed symptoms, but will at some point—is different from asymptomatic, which refers to those who are infected but never show symptoms.
What exactly caused the confusion and why did the WHO walk back its comments? According to the Axios report, Van Kerkhove said that patients sometimes confuse not having any symptoms with only exhibiting mild symptoms. The WHO said it regrets saying that asymptomatic spread is "very rare,” per that report.
