After saying asymptomatic carriers spreading COVID-19 very rare, WHO clarifies

After the World Health Organization(WHO) said that coronavirus transmission from asymptomatic carriers was "very rare", it clarified saying it was "referring to very few studies, some two or three".

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Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's technical lead had said earlier that, "We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing. They're following asymptomatic cases, they're following contacts and they're not finding secondary transmission onward. It's very rare."

The WHO technical lead had told reporters in Geneva that "it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual."

However, Kerkhove on Tuesday walked back on her statement saying: "What I was referring to yesterday in the press conference were very few studies - some two or three studies that had been published that actually try to follow asymptomatic cases, so people who are infected, over time, and then look at all of their contacts and see how many additional people were infected."

"And that's a very small subset of studies. So I was responding to a question at the press conference. I wasn't stating a policy of WHO," Kerkhove added.

"This is a major unknown, because there are so many unknowns around this, some modeling groups have tried to estimate what is the proportion of asymptomatic people that may transmit," she said.