A new survey from the Centers for Disease Control found that 54% of people who tested positive for Covid-19 were unable to determine how they contracted the virus. The remaining 46% of respondents could recall having had close contact with a person, commonly a family member or a co-worker, who was also diagnosed with Covid-19.
These findings are “very concerning” and suggest that people are likely to contract Covid-19 from people in their community who are asymptomatic, said Dr. Joshua Barocas, an infectious disease physician and assistant professor at the University School of Medicine. from Boston in an infectious disease. Society of America report on Wednesday.
“We have seen that an asymptomatic disease is incredibly common, not only in what we would classify as low-risk populations, but also in high-risk populations,” such as people living in shared settings or with underlying health conditions, Barocas said.
And if there is a high level of asymptomatic spread in a community, it also makes contact tracing “incredibly difficult,” said Barocas, which is an important tool in fighting the pandemic.
So what does that mean for you?
Act as if the people around you are infected
Estimates suggest that 25 to 45% of people are asymptomatic carriers of Covid-19. “Our best estimate right now is that for every reported case, there are actually 10 other infections,” Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, said Thursday.
Given that, experts say you should take prevention measures as seriously as you would if you and everyone you interacted with were infected. Doctors are “strongly urging” people to follow behaviors, including wearing a mask whenever they are in public, avoiding large gatherings, limiting socializing with people outside their home, and maintaining social distance from others. Barocas said.
Keep “receipts” of where you are going and who you are with
Keep a record of anyone you have had constant contact with, such as someone who visited your home or someone who was with you in a car. (Quick interactions, like saying “hello” on the sidewalk, aren’t relevant.) Also keep reminders, such as receipts, of any place you have shopped, eaten, or spent time.
That’s to help with contact tracing, which is the process of identifying people who have been exposed to someone who is infectious, Dr. Emily Gurley, an infectious disease epidemiologist and associate scientist at the Bloomberg School of Public Health in Johns Hopkins previously told CNBC Make It. “You are trying to let them know so that they can change their behavior and not infect anyone else without knowing or inadvertently,” she says.
A trained contact tracker will ask an infected person questions about where they went and who they interacted with, and simply relying on memory leaves more room for error. The contact tracker will contact these people and inform them that they may have been exposed to the virus.
But tracking contacts in the United States “is not going well,” White House health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNBC’s Meg Tirrell in an interview on June 26. There are currently around 27,000 to 28,000 contact trackers working in the United States, but an estimated 100,000 are needed, Redfield testified last week.
Even when people can identify a contact, that person may not answer a call from a contact tracker, Dr. Ricardo Franco, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said at the briefing. And in some cases, “your contact will be the anonymous door handle or the gas pump handle,” he said.
He added that contact tracking apps that have been successful in other countries “could mitigate some of the challenges” that the United States faces.
In the absence of effective contact locating measures, the best you can do is limit the amount of exposure you have to others. Part of a contact tracker’s job is to help you remember who you’ve spent time with and where you’ve been, Gurley said. Of course, the fewer people you are exposed to and the places you visit, the easier it is to do.
Get tested
The survey authors say this finding highlights the need for increased detection, case investigation, contact tracking, and isolation of infected people during periods of community transmission.
In discussing the flaws in contact tracking, Fauci said it is time to rethink “the idea that many more tests enter the community and even group the tests.” Grouping tests is a strategy that involves testing samples from multiple people in a single batch.
“The difficult thing is that we are always behind the virus,” because it can take up to 14 days for an infected person to show symptoms, said Dr. Ricardo Franco, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. briefing on Wednesday. However, more generalized tests and active surveillance (such as temperature checks and group tests) of the virus would give more information on how many people are infected, including those who are asymptomatic.
If you have symptoms of Covid-19 (fever, cough, or shortness of breath), or if you have no symptoms but have been in close contact with someone infected with the virus, the Centers for Disease Control suggests testing for the Covid virus. -19.
Antibody tests, which look for levels of Covid-19 antibodies in the blood, can also be “very helpful” because they can help illustrate how many people in a specific community were infected, Dr. Saad Omer, director of the Institute for Global Health at Yale and professor of medicine in infectious diseases at Yale School of Medicine, previously told CNBC Make It.
However, given the dynamic nature of the Covid-19 virus and the unreliability of antibody test results, it is important to remember that a test only provides a snapshot of its status at any given time. There is no harm in getting tested, “as long as you interpret [the results] enough, and it doesn’t relax the other restrictions, “Omer said.
The CDC survey was conducted between April 15 and May 24, and respondents included 350 randomly selected Covid-19 patients whose average age was 52 years.
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