On June 8, the technical lead of the World Health Organisation (WHO), on the COVID-19 pandemic, said transmission by people without symptoms is “very rare”. Following a firestorm of protests by health experts, WHO retracted the claim on June 9, calling it a “misunderstanding”. WHO has been engaged in a series of controversial statements on the role of asymptomatics — those who have been infected with the virus but do not display symptoms — in spreading SARS-CoV-2.
What did the World Health Organisation (WHO) say about the role of asymptomatics? On Monday, June 8, at a virtual press conference, Dr. Maria, WHO’s technical lead on the COVID-19 pandemic, said in response to a question by a journalist, that current evidence seemed to suggest that many countries monitoring asymptomatic cases and their contacts were not finding enough evidence to suggest that they were actually transmitting…
