Asymptomatic cases can be a possible source of significant spread within the population ecology of COVID-19. However, this little information is available on the infectivity and epidemiological importance of individuals with asymptomatic cases COVID-19.
Asymptomatic Cases Caused Virus Infection to Spread
Almost 60% of coronavirus cases are transmitted by people without symptoms or are commonly called asymptomatic cases unless they are pre-symptomatic or never show any signs of COVID-19, a recent U.S. study by Disease Management and Prevention Centers have found out.
It implies that, since they could, anyone, sick or not, should act as if they could spread the virus, the CDC said. Also, previous research has shown that as many as 35% of coronavirus-infected individuals never show symptoms. And, as another study found in September, they bear the same amount of virus in their nose and throat as a sick person.
Last June, when the World Health Organization tried to explain the transmission of the asymptomatic cases, the issue was still out, to some degree, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said how simple it was to catch the virus, even from someone without symptoms.
Especially now that the U.S. endured another sad day amid the turmoil at the Capitol, with the country's daily death toll from coronavirus being the highest reported in any country during the pandemic.
U.S. toll reached 350,000, causing a leading expert in infectious diseases and a sidelined member of the White House pandemic response task force, Dr. Anthony Fauci, to send an implied rebuke to Donald Trump. The latter argued that case figures were inflated and falsely attributed deaths in tweets that morning.
"Go into the trenches," Fauci told NBC's Meet the Press. "Go into the hospitals, go into the intensive care units, and see what is happening. Those are real numbers, real people, and real deaths."
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The results, which came from a model developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, show the significance of following the agency's guidelines on wearing a mask and maintaining social distance, officials said. The appearance of a more infectious form of the virus, first identified in the United Kingdom and discovered by Thursday in eight U.S. states, brings the federal agency's assertion in an even greater focus on how the virus is spreading.
"Those findings are now in bold, and italics and underlined," Jay C. Butler stresses. He is the CDC deputy director for infectious diseases and a co-author of the study published in the JAMA Network open journal.
How the coronavirus spreads is affected by several factors. Butler also called it "a fairly simple mathematical model" and used it to test multiple scenarios, varying the infectious duration and the proportion of transmission from individuals who never develop symptoms or the asymptomatic cases. The researchers followed an admittedly uncomplicated approach.
Approximately half of the viral transmission accounted for the consistently expected asymptomatic cases spread of the model. But Muge Cevik, an authority on infectious diseases at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, argued that some of the model's assumptions were faulty.
"The bottom line is controlling the COVID-19 pandemic really is going to require controlling the silent pandemic of transmission from persons without symptoms," CDC deputy infectious diseases director Jay C. Butler emphasizes on the area of the asymptomatic cases of infected individuals as he told The Washington Post. "The community mitigation tools that we have to need to be utilized broadly to be able to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 from all infected persons, at least until we have those vaccines widely available."
