CLAIM: Coronavirus cases without symptoms aren’t real. An asymptomatic patient is simply a healthy person.
THE FACTS: Posts liked thousands of times on Instagram this week are falsely claiming that asymptomatic COVID-19 cases do not exist. “In case anyone is still confused- an ‘asymptomatic’ person is a healthy person,” the posts read. “Never in the history of acute respiratory illnesses have we declared ‘cases’ without any indication of symptoms. It’s called a false positive. The end.” In fact, asymptomatic COVID-19 infections do occur and are a key feature of the virus, according to the CDC and several experts consulted by The Associated Press. “We know that asymptomatic infections occur based on at least two facts,” said Jade Fulce, public affairs specialist at the CDC. First, she said, the “virus has been isolated by culture from persons who have tested positive but never develop symptoms.” Second, she said, “there are well documented cases of infected persons who are asymptomatic who have transmitted infection.” Though false positive and negative tests can occur, the risk of such errors is low in most of the tests authorized for use by the FDA, Fulce said. Furthermore, false positives due to lab errors are not the same as asymptomatic cases. Though estimates vary, researchers who reviewed the available published data in May 2021 said that at least one-third of people who become infected with the coronavirus likely did not experience symptoms. “This occurs pretty frequently,” said Dr. Roger Shapiro, an associate professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We would not expect our tests to have false positives to that high of a percentage.” Other viruses, including other respiratory viruses, have also been identified in individuals who never developed symptoms, said Dr. Panagis Galiatsatos, an assistant professor in the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Asymptomatic can occur 100%,” Galiatsatos said. “There’s countless cases where an upper respiratory virus never gives you symptoms but still can be highly contagious. There’s many viruses that have done that, and other coronaviruses possibly in the past, as well, have done that.” Experts say when we talk about asymptomatic COVID-19 patients, we are actually talking about two different types of patients. There are patients who are truly asymptomatic and never develop symptoms. Then there are patients who don’t develop symptoms at first, but later do. "We do consider presymptomatic people more infectious,” Shapiro said. “They have virus that’s on the way up, they have viral loads sort of on the way up. They’re more likely to be replicating a lot of virus and passing that on.”
— Associated Press writer Ali Swenson in Semora, North Carolina, contributed this report.
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June 13, 2021 at 01:00AM
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