BELIZE CITY, Sun. June 14, 2020– Belize registered its 21st case of COVID-19, the Ministry of Health has reported.
The Ministry said that a repatriated Belizean man who was in the Houston area of the United States and arrived on a flight on Friday, has tested positive, and that brings the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases for the country to 21.
The person is asymptomatic and will remain in strict quarantine for the next 14 days, during which new samples will be processed. The identification of the new case is a result of the established protocol of testing those returning Belizeans upon arrival, said the Ministry of Health.
Like the other two recent COVID-19 cases, patient #21 is an asymptomatic case.
On Monday, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that asymptomatic persons do not transmit the virus. That is misleading, argues Amy Davidson Sorkin, in a New Yorker magazine article captioned: “What the W.H.O. meant to say about asymptomatic people spreading the coronavirus.”
“They can and do spread the disease, and the W.H.O. knows it. As Michael Ryan, an Irish epidemiologist and a veteran of two Ebola epidemics and the campaign to eradicate polio, who is leading the W.H.O.’s response to COVID-19, said on Tuesday, ‘It’s clear that both symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals are part of the transmission cycle,’” stated Sorkin.
Ryan made the remarks in a live Facebook event on Tuesday as “clarification” of what his WHO colleagues had said the day before.