National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated that 25 to 50% of people infected with coronavirus may never show symptoms
Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued new face-mask guidance, encouraging everyone to wear cloth face coverings when in public. The reasoning: “We now know from recent studies that a significant portion of individuals with coronavirus lack symptoms,” and that those individuals can transmit the virus to others.
Just to be clear: What exactly does it mean to be asymptomatic? If you are truly asymptomatic that means you are infected with a virus, but you never exhibit symptoms of disease. In the case of the coronavirus, those common symptoms would be dry cough, fever, and fatigue. However, as health officials have repeatedly stressed in an attempt to convince people to adhere to strict social-distancing measures, people with the coronavirus who are asymptomatic are still contagious.
Is it possible that some people who were asymptomatic when they were tested later showed symptoms? Absolutely. Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the emerging diseases and zoonoses unit at the World Health Organization, told ProPublica she thinks that many cases have been misclassified as asymptomatic, when in fact they were “presymptomatic.”
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