A woman from Penfield, N.Y, near Rochester unknowingly infected 17 of her 18 children with coronavirus because she did not show any symptoms after contracting the virus. The woman, Brittany Jenick, is reported to have infected the children, some of whom are adopted while asymptomatic five weeks ago.
Jenick eventually become sick from the virus and the children also began to show symptoms. She described the experience as flu-like and she said that the virus hit her family like a freight train.
Jenick said that the experience was terrifying, she was afraid for her life and she was considered that she was never going to be the same, she tells WHAM. The whole family is now slowly recovering after isolating for weeks.
How she got infected
It is still unclear how Jenick was infected. She stated that she asked her friend, Matt Moreno, the CEO of Purify Global, to sanitize her home. Moreno then brought in a team of 12 to scrub down her upstate home for two hours. The said team was wearing hazmat suits for protection the whole time while Jenick's family waited outside for them to finish.
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Moreno said that she put on commercial grade gas masks with a cartridge that is meant to withstand a nuclear attack. So far, New York state, America's epicenter of the outbreak, has had more than 223,699 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and has a death toll of more than 12,000. Across America, there have been 600,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and more than 35,000 deaths.
Asymptomatic patients
According to the director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention or CDC, Robert Redfield, 25% of people who are infected with the new coronavirus do not present any symptoms or fall ill but can still transmit the illness to others. Redfield told NPR that they have confirmed that a significant number of individuals that are infected actually remain asymptomatic.
The asymptomatic carriers are most likely contributing to the rapid spread of the coronavirus around the world and making it difficult for experts to assess the true extent of the pandemic. There are unidentified cases but it is mostly the sicker ones in the hospitals who are being tabulated.
A report from the World Health Organization showed that the coronavirus outbreak in China started getting out of hand back in February. It also showed reports of those who tested positive of the virus but does not show any symptoms. Most of those who were asymptomatic on the date of their diagnosis went on to develop symptoms later.
The report authors also wrote that the proportion of truly asymptomatic infections is unclear but it is relatively rare. In the WHO study, 75% of people in China who were first classified as asymptomatic later developed symptoms. That means that presymptomatic transmission is what is probably common.
The authors also added that these findings have important implications for infection control and they added that a lot of public health approaches rely on the presence of signs and symptoms in order to identify those who are sick and isolate them.
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