Nearly 86 per cent of people who tested positive for COVID-19 during lockdown did not have any of the known coronavirus symptoms such as cough, fever and loss of taste or smell, a new UK study revealed on Thursday.
The University College London (UCL) authors behind the analysis, published in Clinical Epidemiology’, conclude that a more widespread testing programme is therefore needed to catch silent transmission.
The fact that so many people who tested positive were asymptomatic on the day of a positive test result calls for a change to future testing strategies. More widespread testing will help to capture silent’ transmission and potentially prevent future outbreaks, said Professor Irene Petersen, from UCL Epidemiology & Health Care.
Future testing programmes should involve frequent testing of a wider group of individuals, not just symptomatic cases, especially in high-risk settings or places where many people work or live close together such as meat factories or university halls. In the case of university halls, it may be particularly relevant to test all students before they go home for Christmas, she said.
The researchers used data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey pilot study a large population based survey looking at the association between COVID-19 symptoms and COVID-19 test results.
The data showed 115 (0.32 per cent) people out of the total 36,061 people in the pilot study had a positive test result.
Focusing on those with COVID-19 specific symptoms (cough, and/or fever, and/or loss of taste/smell), there were 158 (0.43 per cent) with such symptoms on the day of the test.
Of the 115 with a positive result, there were 16 (13.9 per cent) reporting symptoms and in contrast, 99 (86.1 per cent) did not report any specific symptoms on the day of the test.
Pooled testing could be one way to help implement a widespread testing strategy where several tests are pooled together in one analysis to save time and resources on individual testing. This strategy would be an efficient way to test when the overall prevalence is low as negative pooled samples can quickly show a large group of people are not infectious, notes Prof Petersen. (ANI)
