KUALA LUMPUR, May 31 — A number of studies are revealing a worrying and disturbing feature of the SARS-CoV2 infection: people might be positive and infectious but show no symptoms and do not know of their status.
A study from the Wuhan outbreak in China, found that 42 per cent of those with Covid-19 showed no signs being infected.
An outbreak in a nursing facility in the United States found that 56 per cent of residents were positive but showed no symptoms.
Research into the cluster located on a cruise ship from Argentina in March, found that 80 per cent of passengers who were positive also showed no symptoms or were asymptomatic.
However, this did not mean that such individuals were not infectious.
“A growing body of results shows that people who are asymptomatic appear to have the same viral load as symptomatic cases,” said Gigi Gronvall from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to Business Insider.
“This suggests that transmission is possible equally from both asymptomatic patients and noticeably sick patients.”
Ongoing research have demonstrated that there was not much difference between the two in the amount of virus they would released into the environment.
However, the Wuhan research indicates that those who are asymptomatic did not shed as much virus as those who are symptomatic. The former was 8 days while for the latter was at 19 days. It implied that they were contagious for less of the time.
Also of interest was the fact that most of those who were found to be asymptomatic in that study were women aged between 20 and in the 40s.
