Asymptomatic cases include vulnerable patients
(CNS): Public health officials in the Cayman Islands have now tested almost 15,000 people for COVID-19, and while there are more positive cases daily, Cayman appears so far to have escaped the worst of this virus across the board. While it was expected that screening groups of healthy younger people was likely to reveal asymptomatic cases, it seems that, at this point, the majority of people with underlying health conditions who tested positive have also not become seriously ill by the coronavirus.
Since its presence was first identified in March, COVID-19 has been spreading quietly through the community, with estimates that around 1,000 people could still be positive.
At the beginning of June, 159 people had tested positive in the Cayman Islands, but 109 of them did not develop any symptoms at any time while they were positive with the virus, according to Chief Medical Officer Dr John Lee in response to a CNS request.
This included two people over the age of 70 and 23 individuals who had serious underlying health conditions. This means that just under a quarter of those who were asymptomatic were some of the most vulnerable individuals.
But fortunately, except for the first patient, a cruise ship passenger who was taken to Health City for emergency treatment and later tested positive for the virus, no one has died in Cayman as a result of COVID-19.
Since March, only nine people who did show symptoms have been admitted to the hospital and needed significant care, including six who had underlying health conditions.
Although Cayman appears to have been fortunate when it comes to the impact of the virus, especially because it has not found its way into the care homes for seniors, it is clear from the contact tracing that the virus is being spread here by asymptomatic individuals.
However, a leading scientist from the World Health Organization sparked intense controversy when she said yesterday that the spread of coronavirus by people who are asymptomatic is “very rare”. Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead for COVID-19, said Monday that “asymptomatically-infected individuals are much less likely to transmit the virus than those who develop symptoms”.
“We are constantly looking at this data and we’re trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question. It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits onward,” she stated at the WHO daily briefing yesterday.
However, after considerable push-back from other scientists around the world, she walked back her statement at today’s WHO press briefing, saying that there had been “misunderstanding” about what she had said and stating that there are people who are asymptomatic who can pass the disease on to other people.
Mike Ryan, head of emergency programmes for WHO, said the organisation did not intend “to say there is a new or different policy”. He added,“There is still too much unknown about this virus and still too much unknown about its transmission dynamics.”
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Category: Health, Medical Health
What kind of “fix” is being done at the dump? Capping that organic pile without installing vents to release the gases is no proper fix. Yes, we’ll all be in a “fix” if it’s done improperly
(as it seems to be) and it goes “boom” one day. The fires will pale in comparison! Where are the vents? Where is a proper fix?
Why can’t anything in the public sector be done correctly the first time, instead of two, three or more attempts? Like the repairs to the ‘”sink” at the bottom of the bridge going southbound opposite Foster Bay condos. NRA took 5 attempts to finally do a proper repair!!
Waste of public funds and no accountability!!
Vaccine or dump fixed. Which one will come first?
Ahhh – the dump is in the process of being fixed right now. Have you not seen what has already been done?
Cayman can only influence on of those items.
Ahh- starting a new pile. Great “fix”
How about a china fix
Will summer camps open?
CNS: Ask the question on the forum – see here.
If I had to choose, I’d prefer to manage a lifetime of Herpes Simplex to a seemingly asymptomatic cureless, and possibly lifetime COVID-19 case. Neither has a vaccine, but at least Herpes is better understood and manageable without killing granny, or the host.
And WHO retracted their statement
They didn’t retract. They clarified when health officials review cases that are initially reported to be asymptomatic, “we find out that many have really mild disease.” There are some infected people who are “truly asymptomatic,” she said, but countries that are doing detailed contact tracing are “not finding secondary transmission onward” from those cases. “It’s very rare,” she said.
AKA they retracted.
No. The person who originally made the statement said they were replying to a press question and not making any official statement on behalf of WHO.
Curious to see what other kind of life choices you would make! If you get covid (and you probably will at some point), you’re 99% likely to either have no symptoms or have extremely mild ones, e.g. a cough or fever for a week or two. You’d really rather have Herpes than that?
Global Covid epidemiologists don’t even know how it works. Maybe they should call you?
I feel like all the brilliant minds in medicine have developed the “dumbs” when it comes to this virus. They can cure polio and smallpox, put humans into outer space, build computers into tiny cellphones..
And in many months of research, they still really know… nothing. Every statement that is made is retracted,
Everything they claim to know is refuted and the opposite claimed the next day.
It’s like they all went to sleep at the beginning of this pandemic virus and just woke up with a frontal lobotomy.
We’ve had SARS virus before, they had a head start on this… what happened?
CNS would you please ask Dr. Lee about protocols to deal with False Positives.
https://theconversation.com/the-positives-and-negatives-of-mass-testing-for-coronavirus-137792
This articles has a good overview on the issues. I have also seen other areas where they did not want to test because of the risk of false positives in a population where the virus was not wide-spread.
The reality is that no one is sick and there are limits to the accuracy of the tests. If we had a time machine there is a very strong possibility that if we went back to Cayman in June of 2019 we would get the same results we are getting now.
We know from the rest of the world that if the virus were present in the community un-controlled we would have some people who are ill. The fact that none of the positive cases are actually sick is telling us something but it appears we do not want to listen.
Do you agree that there’s still so much unknown about this?
Yes quite a bit that is unknown, therefore it would be good to know how the CIG/CMO are addressing the issue of potential false positives.
Wendy did. The quality assurance questions are best answered by our lab technicians.
Nope
You really trust your life to them?🤣
That article was a bit short on actual evidence, except highlighting that no test is 100% accurate. They hypothesize that a false positive could be 1 in 1,000, which with such a small number of tests in Cayman of 15,000 would be 15 people identified incorrectly out of 150 who are reported to have it. I thought that all of the initial test were done off island, and were consistent with the same rate of positives that we are seeing?
WHO is now saying transmission by asymptomatic people is highly unlikely so we just killed the economy and had people blow through their pensions for no reason.
CNS: The person at WHO who said that has now back-tracked and basically said they have no idea. See here.
They didn’t backtrack such much as muddied the water by adding presymtomatic to asymptomatic and symptomatic. Research has shown that people become infectious before they start feeling sick, during that presymptomatic period.
My thumbs up was for cns
6:27 so was mine!
So, removing any confusion over asymptomatic and spreading, even vulnerable in our community haven’t been affected very badly. Seems like we can move on now. We are crying wolf over covid and we should be focused on the dump, that is actually a health hazard. Where are the government programs set up to test everyone on island for lung disease because the years of mismanagement of the toxic dump?