In a blow to the COVID-19 “silent spreader” narrative that has been used to push for universal masking, including controversially among schoolchildren, a recent study published in The Lancet suggests that people who are non-symptomatic rarely have the ability to infect others.

Silent transmission is the idea that those who are infected with COVID-19 but show no symptoms can still spread the virus to other people.

While all relevant studies show that presymptomatic and asymptomatic “silent spreaders” account for some proportion of infections in other people, the degree of silent transmission is less clear.

A number of early studies—in some cases affected by limitations that may have led to their proportion of presymptomatic transmission to be “artifactually inflated”—suggested that silent transmission accounted for around half of secondary infections, or even more.