WHO Report Pandemic Worsening, as Media Lie Prevention Is Unneeded with Few Asymptomatic Cases
June 9, 2020 (EIRNS)—WHO’s Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and colleagues gave their briefing to the press yesterday, on figures and key points about the COVID-19 pandemic. Then, after one question about how asymptomatic transmission is less than earlier thought, a media virus took hold for the next 36 hours, showing up in press reports that social distancing orders, masks and stay-at-home, wasn’t warranted. It reached the point that today, the WHO official had to restate the scientific point.
Tedros opened the 40-minute briefing by stressing the vital role of food safety during the COVID-19 crisis. He addressed the danger of complacency as COVID-19 recedes in Europe, as the pandemic is escalating worldwide with more than 100,000 new cases in nine of the last ten days, and a new world record of 136,000 on Sunday. The total is about 7 million, with almost 400,000 deaths. Present areas of concentration are the Americas and South Asia. Most of Africa is on the increase, though presently a small part of the overall numbers.
Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove warned that Guatemala’s cases and deaths have spiked upwards last week by 50 and 100%, respectively; and, in general, that the massive increases in South America—with too few intensive care beds and health system capacity—are not over. Dr. Michael Ryan reiterated the point of all three: that the focus must be on the only sane approach, including public health infrastructure; locate cases; isolating; testing; providing sufficient medical care; having the workforce for tracing; and providing sufficient tests and labs—and all this throughout the world.
However, In response to a question from Reuters about asymptomatic cases, Dr. Van Kerkhove explained that some countries had done exceedingly efficient tracking. In the process, they had found that many of the cases reported as “asymptomatic” actually were cases with minor symptoms; and that there were, in fact, only rare cases of individuals who both tested positive for the virus and truly showed no symptoms at all. Hence, since there were very few “truly asymptomatic” cases, those individuals played a very small part in the spread of disease, relative to the pre-symptomatic individuals. Then, Dr. Van Kerkhove returned to the theme that massive and serious contact tracing was the central thrust.
At this early stage, it appears that the media virus first hit humans at CNBC and quickly spread to National Review, all between 1 and 3 pm, Monday. CNBC misstated Van Kerkhove’s comments as: “To be sure, asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread of the virus appears to still be happening ... but remains rare.” National Review caught the bug: “Pardon my whiplash. So, now that we know COVID is not as dangerous as was initially thought, will those calling for mandatory vaccines and mask-wearing retract their advocacy.” Finally, Fox News last night quivered with the media virus, reporting that all the prolonged lock-down, stay-at-home and other measures were based on falsehood.
It is to be hoped that in the near future a vaccine may be developed to deal with the infection of media-driven hysteria.
