On Sunday, the world saw around 136,000 new cases of the coronavirus disease — the most in a single day. On Monday, the World Health Organization’s director general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said this in a media briefing. WHO also warned that the pandemic appears to be accelerating.
The number may not be accurate — although it has been widely reported by many respected media outlets without qualification — but the trend is. The New York Times’ database shows 114,990 new cases on Sunday, June 7. The Johns Hopkins database shows around 119,100 cases on Sunday and worldometers.info 113,417.
Perhaps, everyone else has it wrong. Or maybe, this is another thing that WHO — it once said masks weren’t required and that there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus disease — has gotten wrong.
But that wasn’t the strangest thing someone from WHO said on Monday. The organization’s technical lead for Covid-19, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove, said in a briefing that: “It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits onward.” Experts reacted cautiously. Some said that, if true, it was a momentous discovery. Others said they’d like WHO to provide more details.
It’s been widely accepted so far that asymptomatic individuals — around a third of the infected population, according to some experts; and around a fourth of the infected population in India, according to a study of around 40,000 cases by the Indian Council of Medical Research — pose a big transmission risk.
{{/usCountry}}It’s been widely accepted so far that asymptomatic individuals — around a third of the infected population, according to some experts; and around a fourth of the infected population in India, according to a study of around 40,000 cases by the Indian Council of Medical Research — pose a big transmission risk.
{{/usCountry}}One expert, Dr Ashish Jha, the director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, took to Twitter and reasoned that perhaps “WHO is drawing a distinction between asymptomatic spread and pre-symptomatic spread” and that “maybe there isn’t a lot of asymptomatic spread but plenty of pre-symptomatic spread”. But he added that “such a statement by WHO should be accompanied by data” and that “WHO should be clearer in communication” (see page 11).
WHO partially walked back the comment on Tuesday, but stopped short of a complete retraction (which would have been preferable).
As for the trend that WHO did get right, the pandemic does not appear to be slowing down even as the number of cases has exceeded 7 million and the number of deaths 400,000. There are new hot spots that are driving up the number of cases; India, Russia, and Brazil are all hot spots and Latin America would appear to be the next epicentre of the pandemic which, even as it wanes in one geography, starts growing in another (see page 11).
Countries and cities affected early by Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, are now opening up. Europe appears to be fine; according to a report in the Wall Street Journal that cited the European Centre for Disease Control, infections in early June are 80% lower than the peak seen in early April. Even New York City started opening up earlier this week. Experts say that while the virus seems to have run its course in these countries and cities, scattered flare-ups of infections cannot be ruled out. Many countries have seen these, but barring Singapore and, now, Iran, most have avoided a full-fledged second wave of infections — at least for now.
While on the subject of waves, research by the Harvard Medical School, based on satellite images of hospital parking lots in Wuhan and search engine queries for “cough” and “diarrhoea” (both symptoms of Covid-19) suggest that China’s first wave may have started as early as August 2019, Reuters reported on Tuesday. China dismissed the claim as “ridiculous” but it is still not clear how the virus mysteriously emerged in Wuhan in December (see page 11).
That is an important piece of the puzzle.