More than half of coronavirus cases are transmitted from people without symptoms of the virus, according to a new model from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“In this baseline case, 59% of all transmission comes from asymptomatic transmission, which comprises 35% of presymptomatic individuals and 24% of individuals who never show symptoms,” the says the model.
Presymptomatic individuals are those who had symptoms of the virus, but were asymptomatic and infectious before developing their symptoms.
The authors concluded “that the identification and isolation of people with symptomatic COVID-19 alone will not control the continued spread of SARS-CoV-2 ”.
According to the model, published on Thursday on the JAMA network, to slow down the spread of the virus we need to focus more on people who do not have symptoms.
“These findings suggest that measures such as putting on masks, hand hygiene, social distancing and strategic testing of people who are not ill will be critical to curbing the spread of COVID-19 until safe and effective vaccines are available and widely used.” said the authors.
Vaccines are being deployed in the United States at a slower pace than expected. President-elect Joe Biden
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“The end result is controlling the COVID-19 pandemic that will really require controlling the silent transmission pandemic of asymptomatic people,” said Jay Butler, CDC deputy director of infectious diseases and co-author of the study, he told the Washington Post. “The community mitigation tools we have need to be widely used to be able to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2 from all infected people, at least until we have these vaccines widely available.”