European health officials say they were reluctant to acknowledge the silent spread because the evidence was coming and the consequences of a false alarm would have been serious. “These reports are seen everywhere, around the world,” said Dr. Josep Jansa, a senior health official for the European Union. “Whatever we take out, there is no going back.”
Looking back, health officials should have said yes, that a spread was occurring without symptoms and that they did not understand how frequent it was, said Dr. Agoritsa Baka, a senior doctor in the European Union.
But doing that, he said, would have been an implicit warning to countries: What you’re doing might not be enough.
‘Stop buying masks!’
While public health officials hesitated, some doctors acted. At a conference in Seattle in mid-February, Jeffrey Shaman, a professor at Columbia University, said his research suggested that the rapid spread of Covid-19 could only be explained if there were infectious patients with unremarkable or symptom-free symptoms.
In the audience that day was Steven Chu, the Nobel-winning physicist and former energy secretary of the United States. “If left alone, this disease will spread to the entire population,” recalls Professor Shaman’s warning.
Then Dr. Chu began to insist that healthy colleagues in his Stanford University laboratory wear masks. Doctors in Cambridge, England, concluded that asymptomatic transmission was a major source of infection and advised local health workers and patients to wear masks, long before the British government recognized the risk of silent spreaders.
US authorities, faced with a shortage, actively discouraged the public from buying masks. “Seriously folks – STOP BUYING MASKS!” Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams tweeted on February 29.
