COVID-19 Transmission Method Retracted by WHO

I want to thank a good friend of mine, Roy Cohen, for commenting on my article yesterday and bringing current clarifications from the World Health Organization and the statement published by them 24 hours earlier. The WHO retracted their statement about asymptomatic people and suggested presymptomatic may be more true.

Yesterday, WHO reported that a person with symptoms of COVID-19 could rarely infect another person. Sometimes the left-hand does not know what the right hand is doing. We see it often in different aspects of our lives. He said, she said, etc. We hear things differently, even if they are the exact same words.

The official WHO retraction for the transmission of COVID-19 is that they do not know how it is transmitted. After months of study, the actual method of transmission remains a mystery outside of an infected person spewing (by coughing, singing, talking, yelling, etc.) infectious droplets in the air and a healthy person breathes in some of those infected droplets.

Most of the infections appear to be from active cases, with symptoms, breathing out infected air. Beyond that, the contagion can remain for minutes to hours on the surface of various items. That is why we have been told to wear masks when we cannot avoid a six-foot open space between people. We have also been told to wash our hands often and to wear gloves.

WHO is using a term I have not come across until recently – presymptomatic. A person can have the virus and be asymptomatic or presymptomatic. The presymptomatic period is that time before the infected person starts to feel sick. If the WHO had used the term, presymptomatic’ instead of ‘asymptomatic’ yesterday, they might have been correct enough not to issue a retraction.

WHO has been reviewing case histories and have determined that some asymptomatic (people never displaying any symptoms) people probably had a mild case of COVID-19 and were not asymptomatic after all. Some countries have done extensive tracking of who saw whom or touched whom and found that asymptomatic people rarely infect others.

Regardless of the terminology used by the WHO or other countries, you can get COVID-19 from a person who is not displaying any symptoms of COVID-19. I asked myself, why? Both the presymptomatic person and the asymptomatic person have no symptoms during the first few days of infection. Then, the asymptomatic person remains without symptoms and is unlikely to infect another person.

The presymptomatic person exhibits no symptoms for the first few days and can infect a healthy person. I am thinking that the asymptomatic person has a strong enough immune system to suppress the ability to transmit COVID-19 while the presymptomatic person without a stronger immune system will succumb to the disease shortly and remains contagious during those first days. That presymptomatic person may have mild to very mild symptoms and possibly never know he or she was infected. Time will tell, I hope!

Live Longer & Enjoy Life! – Red O’Laughlin – RedOLaughlin.com