Asymptomatic Transmission of Covid-19 : Medics Say It’s Possible

World Health Organizations’ Covid-19 Technical Lead, Maria Van Kerkhove recently, claimed that asymptomatic transmission of the disease is “extremely rare.” Shortly after, the health organisation reaffirmed that the transmission of Covid-19 from asymptomatic patients is possible and does happen although scientists have not determined yet how frequently people with asymptomatic cases of Covid-19 pass the disease on to others. The clarification comes after the WHO’s original comments incited strong pushback from outside public health experts, who suggested the agency had erred, or at least mis-communicated, when it said people who did not show symptoms were unlikely to spread the virus.
Van Kerkhove later acknowledged that her use of the phrase “very rare” had been a miscommunication. She said she had based that phrasing on findings from a small number of studies that followed asymptomatic cases and tracked how many of their contacts became infected. She said she did not mean to imply that “asymptomatic transmission globally” was happening rarely, because that has not been determined yet. During a June 9 press briefing, the WHO Technical Lead further clarified that her comments were in response to a journalist’s question, and did not constitute official WHO policy. 
Maria Van Kerkhove, has made it very clear that the actual rates of asymptomatic transmission are not yet known. “The majority of transmission that we know about is that people who have symptoms transmit the virus to other people through infectious droplets,” Van Kerkhove said. “But there are subsets of people who do not develop symptoms, and to truly understand how many people do not have symptoms, we do not actually have that answer yet”, Van Kerkhove’s remarked during a WHO question and answer session aimed at explaining what was known and u...