Top government infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said the World Health Organization “was not correct” in claiming that asymptomatic transmission of the coronavirus is “very rare.”
“They walked that back, because there’s no evidence that that’s the case,” Fauci said on Good Morning America Wednesday, referring to the statement made by WHO epidemiologist Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove. “To make a statement that that’s a rare event was not correct.”
Kerkhove said Monday that “it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual.” She revised her statement on Tuesday via a Facebook Live event, when she said, “I was responding to a question at the press conference. I wasn’t stating a policy of WHO or anything like that. I was trying to articulate what we know, and in that, I used the phrase ‘very rare.’”
Her claim spurred criticism from other health experts and epidemiologists because reducing the risk of asymptomatic spread was a goal of enacting statewide lockdowns and economic restrictions. Fauci and members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force have stressed the need to curb asymptomatic transmission of the virus since the pandemic began.
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“The evidence that we have, given the percentage of people, which is about 25, 45% of the totality of infected people likely are without symptoms,” Fauci said Wednesday. “And we know from epidemiological studies that they can transmit to someone who is uninfected.”
While the number of coronavirus infections in the United States is just below 2 million as of Wednesday morning, the country continues to reopen so that commerce can resume. Daily case growth is slowing, but Fauci warned that the pandemic is not over. Some communities, he said, will see very low infection rates, while others still need to be cautious about a spike in transmission.
