The study, published on Feb. 21, confirmed that a 20-year-old woman from the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the disease first broke out, traveled 400 miles north to Anyang City in January, where she infected five members of her family.
A scan of her chest by doctors showed no significant abnormalities, and her first coronavirus diagnostic result was negative. However, her second test came back positive, despite her displaying no symptoms whatsoever.
Meanwhile, five of the woman’s family members developed “moderate” COVID-19, and two developed severe pneumonia, according to Dr. Meiyun Wang of the People’s Hospital of Zhengzhou University and colleagues who conducted the study.
The boy and five family members traveled to Wuhan from Shenzhen City in southern China, between Dec 29, 2019 and Jan 4, 2020.
“If the findings in this report of presumed transmission by an asymptomatic carrier are replicated, the prevention of COVID-19 infection would prove challenging,” the researchers wrote, adding that the “mechanism by which asymptomatic carriers could acquire and transmit the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 requires further study.”
“What we don’t know though is how much of the asymptomatic cases are driving transmission. What I’ve learned in the last two weeks is that the spectrum of this illness is much broader than was originally presented. There’s much more asymptomatic illness,” Redfield said.
“A number of the confirmed cases that we confirmed actually just presented with a little sore throat,” he added.
Over two thousand people have died from the virus, mostly in China, with over 60,00 infected. But experts and eyewitness accounts have indicated that the true number of cases and deaths in China is far greater than officially reported.