With the increasing number of people getting inflicted and thousands of deaths due to the coronavirus around the globe, local governments are now trying so hard to contain the virus in every way possible. One of the things they do to reach this goal is by secluding those people who are displaying symptoms, isolating them from the public so that other people won't get infected, and by giving them the medication they need.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says common symptoms that everyone should look out are fever, dry cough, and tiredness. Some patients also experience other symptoms such as the runny nose, diarrhea, sore throat, nasal congestion, and body pains.
If this is only the criteria, monitoring people with symptoms and containing the virus would be way easier, health officials say. Unfortunately, this is not always the situation as there are also people who are positive with the virus but show less to no signs (asymptomatic) at all.
In Massachusetts, among all the cases that have been recorded in the state, 82 cases were said to be caused and infected by asymptomatic individuals. But since these people don't infect the population as fast as symptomatic people can and are not considered a "major driver" of why the virus spread, the highlight of the camera is still not focused on them.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the administration's coronavirus response coordinator, on the other hand, is urging everyone to take asymptomatic transmission seriously just like how the people around the world are managing its counterpart. According to Birx, people who show no symptoms can still transmit the virus, which could help worsen the situation. Health authorities also have limited information about the total number of asymptomatic people and how these people can transmit the virus, making it more difficult to control.
We may not know yet the exact number of asymptomatic people due to how difficult to determine who's who. But one thing Birx is sure of: controlling asymptomatic transmission plays a very crucial role in ending the coronavirus pandemic our world is experiencing now, as reported by CNN.
"Our analysis would suggest that presymptomatic transmission is pretty commonplace", shared Caroline Colijin, an expert who leads the mathematics, genomics, and prediction in infection and evolution research group at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. "If I were writing that CDC webpage today, I would phrase that a little more towards transmission before symptoms show up," Colijin added.
