By: AP
A dozen new coronavirus cases in the Philadelphia area have been traced to someone who attended gatherings at beach houses at the Jersey Shore, health officials said.
Eleven cases reported Saturday were linked to a New Jersey resident at gatherings in the past two weeks, Bucks County officials said. One case reported Friday also was traced to the person.
It’s an important reminder not to let one’s guard down at the beach, said Dr. David Damsker, health director of the large county, which borders Philadelphia to the south and New Jersey to the east. He did not disclose exactly where the gatherings took place.
The region’s mass transit system on Monday reinstated a requirement that passengers wear masks. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority had eased the requirement to a recommendation in April after a viral video showed a rider being dragged off a bus by police after boarding without a mask.
Employees will now remind riders of the requirement, SEPTA said.
In a somewhat related development, it was reported that the World Health Organization says it still believes the spread of the coronavirus from people without symptoms is “rare,” despite warnings from numerous experts worldwide that such transmission is more frequent and likely explains why the pandemic has been so hard to contain.
Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s technical lead on COVID-19 said at a press briefing on Monday that many countries are reporting cases of spread from people who are asymptomatic, or those with no clinical symptoms. But when questioned in more detail about these cases, Van Kerkhove said many of them turn out to have mild disease, or unusual symptoms.
Although health officials in countries including Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere have warned that COVID-19 is spreading from people without symptoms, WHO has maintained that this type of spread is not a driver of the pandemic and is probably accounts for about 6% of spread, at most. Numerous studies have suggested that the virus is spreading from people without symptoms, but many of those are either anecdotal reports or based on modeling.
Van Kerkhove said that based on data from countries, when people with no symptoms of COVID-19 are tracked over a long period to see if they spread the disease, there are very few cases of spread.
“We are constantly looking at this data and we’re trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question,” she said. “It still appears to be rare that asymptomatic individuals actually transmit onward.”
(AP)
