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Dr Maria Van Kerkhove stated on Monday it was “really rare” for asymptomatic people to pass the illness on.
Dr Van Kerkhove said the evidence she had been talking about came from countries that had brought out “detailed contact tracing”,
Looking at examinations of clusters of infections from numerous countries, she said that where an asymptomatic case had been followed up it was “very unusual” to discover secondary infections amongst their contacts.
Dr Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s head of emerging diseases, made the distinction between three categories:
- People who never develop signs (asymptomatic)
- P