Commentary In January 2020, at the very start of the pandemic, the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter that suggested the possibility that covid could be spread by people who did not show any symptoms of the illness. This article was based on a single case report. Germany’s public health agency, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), later spoke with the person mentioned in the case report, who was supposedly the asymptomatic spreader, and she clarified that she did have symptoms encountering the second person mentioned in the article. So, this case report, published in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, was a false alarm. But no matter, the myth of asymptomatic spread was born. On June 8, 2020, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that asymptomatic people could transmit covid. That same day, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead for the covid pandemic, clarified that people who have …