Coronavirus Watch.

Global Statistics

7,458,921 cases of the Covid-19 pandemic have been recorded so far after 134, 705 new cases were recorded yesterday. 
The death toll worldwide is now at 419 020 after 5,165 deaths were recorded yesterday. 

Brazil recorded 33,100 new cases yesterday, the highest daily rate in the country since the outbreak began.

Russia now has the third highest number of cases worldwide with 493,657 confirmed cases, the country recorded 6,358 cases of the virus which is relatively low as compared to other countries that have high infected cases. 

There were 2,430 new cases recorded in South Africa to bring the total number of case to 55,421. The death toll is now at 1,210 after 48 new deaths were recorded. 

Eswatini recorded 27 new cases to bring the total number of cases to 398, with 3 deaths recorded so far and 236cases that have been reported to have recovered. 

Zimbabwean statistics are now at 320 confirmed cases after 6 new cases were recorded; the number of recoveries has risen to 49 and the number of active cases is 267. 

WHO clarifies comments on asymptomatic spread of Covid-19: We don’t actually have that answer yet

A top World Health Organization official clarified on Tuesday that scientists have not determined yet how frequently people with asymptomatic cases of Covid-19 pass the disease on to others, a day after suggesting that such spread is “very rare.”

The clarification comes after the WHO’s original comments incited strong pushback from outside public health experts, who suggested the agency had erred, or at least miscommunicated, when it said people who didn’t show symptoms were unlikely to spread the virus.

Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on the Covid-19 pandemic, made it very clear Tuesday that the actual rates of asymptomatic transmission aren’t yet known.

“The majority of transmission that we know about is that people who have symptoms transmit the virus to other people through infectious droplets,” Van Kerkhove said.

“But there are a subset of people who don’t develop symptoms, and to truly understand how many people don’t have symptoms, we don’t actually have that answer yet.”

Van Kerkhove’s remarks on Tuesday came at a WHO question-and-answer session aimed at explaining what was known and unknown about how the virus spreads.

Some of the confusion boiled down to the details of what an asymptomatic infection actually is, and the different ways the term is used.

While some cases of Covid-19 are fully asymptomatic, sometimes the word is also used to describe people who haven’t started showing symptoms yet, when they are presymptomatic.

Research has shown that people become infectious before they start feeling sick, during that presymptomatic period.

To some, it came across as if the WHO was suggesting that people without symptoms weren’t driving spread.
Some studies, however, have estimated that people without symptoms (whether truly asymptomatic or presymptomatic) could be responsible for up to half of the spread, which is why the virus has been so difficult to contain.

Isolating people who are sick, for example, does not prevent the possibility they already passed the virus on to others. Some modeling studies have assumed quite widespread asymptomatic transmission. Stat News

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11/06/2020

(Source: Kitco)