World Health Organization has said that while there appears to be evidence that person-to-person transmission is possible from a person who displays no symptoms of coronavirus, that this is rare.

“From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual,” Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead on the WHO’s health emergencies programme, said at a press conference on Monday evening.

Dr Van Kerkhove said the conclusion follows monitoring of many countries' data generated from track and trace schemes. She explained that asymptomatic cases were typically identified as contacts of a person with symptoms, but that there appeared to be extremely low transmission to the contacts of the asymptomatic patients.