Holy s*it. The WHO is now walking back comments made by Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove yesterday saying that asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 is “very rare”:
This is wild.
•The @WHO is backtracking on comments made yesterday saying asymptomatic spread of COVID-19 is “very rare.”
•They now say it’s a “big open question.”
•The WHO says the “very rare” reference, yesterday, referred to “a very few studies…”https://t.co/Rv7GIvxc2T— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) June 9, 2020
Do these pinheads understand the damage they’ve done to themselves with this backtracking?
The organization giving us their expert advice is making it up as they go along… https://t.co/HvR8RZzPqG
— Alex Pierson (@AlexpiersonAMP) June 9, 2020
Via CNBC, she said during a live stream that “between 6% of the population and 41% of the population may be infected but not have symptoms”:
“We don’t actually have that answer yet. There are some estimates that suggest that anywhere between 6% of the population and 41% of the population may be infected but not have symptoms within a point estimate of around 16%,” she said on a live Q&A streamed across multiple social media platforms.
And she’s saying she did not include data from models that show “around 40% of transmission may be due to asymptomatic” spread:
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“Some estimates of around 40% of transmission may be due to asymptomatic, but those are from models, so I didn’t include that in my answer yesterday, but wanted to make sure that I covered that here,” Kerkhove said.
Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s emergencies program, added that things could have been said better yesterday:
Ryan acknowledged that Kerkhove’s comments created a stir, saying they may have been “misinterpreted or maybe we didn’t use the most elegant words to explain that.”
In other words, we still don’t know anything. That’s not reassuring:
Yesterday's confusing announcement from WHO was treated as breaking news, supposedly an upending of our understanding of the risk of transmission from non-symptomatic people. However (as their attempts to clarify today indicate), our understanding has not really changed.
— Josh Michaud (@joshmich) June 9, 2020
And as we told you earlier in a VIP post, they’re trying to distinguish between truly asymptomatic case, pre-symptomatic and mild cases:
There is a significant amount of evidence that non-symptomatic (pre-symptomatic & true asymptomatic) transmission occurs, and can in fact be an important contributor to transmission.https://t.co/kDuPDbt7be
— Josh Michaud (@joshmich) June 9, 2020
And:
But, this doesn't necessarily apply to pre-symptomatic/ mildly symptomatic cases. The true risk of infection from non-symptomatic cases is unknown, but it's not zero and it may in fact be quite high (some estimates run from the maybe 16%- over 50% of transmission from such cases.
— Josh Michaud (@joshmich) June 9, 2020
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Related:
VIP >> WHO researcher who said asymptomatic spread of Covid-19 is 'very rare' clarifies what she meant https://t.co/DgGXsL2tJv
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) June 9, 2020
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