Coronavirus remains a mystery for scientists and researchers as there are still several aspects of COVID-19 that remain untouched. One of them is how it is spreading through silent spreaders. While most of the people who get infected show symptoms like cough, fever, tiredness, there are some who show no symptoms at all.
Researchers say it’s vital to understand how many are affected this way and whether “silent spreaders” are fuelling the pandemic, reported BBC.
According to a study, a couple – who returned from China – had no symptoms of COVID-19 and attended a gathering at a church in Singapore on 19 January.
“The couple left as soon as the service was over. But shortly afterward, things took a turn for the worse, and in a wholly confusing way. The wife started to become ill on January 22, followed by her husband two days later. Because they had flown in from Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, that was no big surprise,” the report said.
So Dr Lee and his fellow scientists, along with police officers and specialist disease trackers, launched an investigation, generating detailed maps showing who was where and when. They found a woman was infected with the virus but she was not present at that event. Instead, she attended another gathering the next day.
“Investigators resorted to going through the CCTV recordings made at the church that Sunday to search for clues. And they stumbled across something completely unexpected – the woman who’d attended the later service, after the Chinese couple had left, had sat in the seats they had used several hours earlier,” said the report.
So the couple, despite having no symptoms, managed to spread the deadly virus. For Dr Lee, there was only one possible explanation for this – that the COVID-19 was being passed by people who had it without even realising. This was a revelation that would be relevant the world over because the central message of all public health advice on coronavirus has always been to look out for symptoms in yourself and others.
