New findings indicate coronavirus may be contagious even before carriers show symptoms -- making the outbreak even harder to contain.
and some achiness in her chest -- that she didn’t know she was getting sick until she returned to home to China.Isaac Bogoch, MD, an epidemiologist who studies infectious diseases at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute in Canada, said the report raised important questions.
He says when you scale up the findings to a larger population, it could mean there are a lot of people who are infected under the radar of public health officials. They aren’t seeing doctors because they don’t feel sick, and they may be passing the virus without knowing it because they’re not staying home from work or school.
Bogoch points out that in other viral respiratory diseases, people with symptoms are more significant spreaders because their coughing and generate more infectious droplets. But that doesn’t mean that people with silent infections aren’t playing a role.“I don’t think anybody that works around respiratory diseases is really surprised by this,” says David Brett-Major, MD, a professor and epidemiologist at the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.can infect others two days before their first symptoms appear, for example.
“If this is going to progress into a more pervasive respiratory virus, having delayed it allows more reinforcement of usual measures. It allows more diagnostic testing to be available. It allows both community and health system awareness to be present. It can, I think, impact patient and community outcomes,” he says.
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