Scientific research
How early can COVID-19 be transmitted before symptom onset?
Nature Medicine has published the latest research on pre-symptomatic transmission of COVID-19 by Eric Lau, Peng Wu, Ben Cowling and Gabriel Leung. They estimated that an infected individual would be able to transmit the virus as early as 2-3 days before symptom onset, resulting in 44% of secondary cases secondary cases being infected during the index cases’ pre-symptomatic stage. Besides, high viral loads were detected soon after symptom onset and would gradually decrease towards the detection limit at about 21 days after symptom onset. Given a substantial proportion of pre-symptomatic transmission, measures such as enhanced personal hygiene and social distancing are encouraged which would play an important role in community disease control.
Read more about this paper here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0869-5
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