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Dr Le Van Tan in OUCRU, in collaboration with the Hospital for Tropical Diseases and the Department of Health, has shown that it is common for people who are infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) to have no symptoms whatsoever. By testing quarantined people in Vietnam, his team was able to detect asymptomatic individuals. The virus disappeared faster from the bodies of the asymptomatic carriers than from that of symptomatic individuals, but it appeared that some of them still managed to pass the infection on to others.

Diagram showing symptomatic and asymptomatic transmission in a cluster in Vietnam, April 2020

Red circles indicate symptomatic patients, while blue circles indicate asymptomatic individuals. Patients sitting on the large open circle are those who first came to a local bar on March 14th 2020. Arrows indicate patients who were tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 after having contact with individuals who attended the event.

Read more on the OUCRU website

Read the full manuscript published in Clinical Infectious Diseases

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