Hyderabad: Asymptomatic spread of Covid 'very rare' stated WHO

Hyderabad: There have been comments by medical experts in the last two-three months as to how Covid asymptomatic individuals can act as virus carriers and spread the disease to several others who come in contact with them in their daily life. The World Health Organisation (WHO) made a key announcement that is expected to bring a major relief to people across the world. TelanganaWHO officials stated that spread of coronavirus by people not showing symptoms appears to be rare.

"We have a number of reports from countries which are doing detailed contact tracing-they are following symptomatic cases, they are following contacts and it appears rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits the disease onward," WHO official Dr Maria Van Kerkhove said during daily news briefing. What we really want to be focussed on is following the symptomatic cases, WHO said.

Corona is new disease that shook the entire world and there is no robust data regarding infectiousness of asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic individuals and how much asymptomatic infection drives transmission. A Singapore study found pre-symptomatic transmission of nCoV in 6.4 percent of 157 locally acquired cases.

From the ICMR data it can be said that symptomatic individuals are super spreaders and they are twice vulnerable to get the disease than asymptomatic high risk contacts of laboratory confirmed cases.

Dr Kiran Madhala, HoD, Anesthesia, GMC, Nizamabad stressed the need to isolate the symptomatic individuals as they are key drivers of this pandemic. Isolating high risk people is the need of the hour as the attack rate and positivity rate is high among them. This can drastically reduce the transmission chain, Dr Kiran felt.