Over the past few months, we’ve all learned a lot about coronavirus—who it affects badly, it doesn’t affect, what the symptoms are, or on the opposite end of the spectrum, the fact that you can not develop symptoms at all.

Perhaps one of the strangest things about coronavirus is that people can walk around with the virus, but without any physical ailments. At first, experts suggested socially distancing, even from seemingly healthy individuals. If people could have it without having so much as a cough, it was the safest way.

However, now, the World Health Organization has recently shared that people who are asymptomatic might not be able to spread the virus as easily as they once thought. In fact, they deemed the asymptomatic spread of coronavirus “very rare”—which contradicts what experts have been saying for months.

“From the data we have, it still seems to be rare that an asymptomatic person actually transmits onward to a secondary individual,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit, said. “It’s very rare.”

It may still be able to happen, but chances are, if you come into close contact with someone not displaying symptoms, you’re pretty safe from contracting it.

Because of these new findings, experts may turn their focus to solely symptomatic cases, which may be the key to really making a difference in the global pandemic.

“What we really want to be focused on is following the symptomatic cases,” Van Kerkhove said. “If we actually followed all of the symptomatic cases, isolated those cases, followed the contacts, and quarantined those contacts, we would drastically reduce” the outbreak.

To hear more about this new finding, as well as where we are in terms of global cases check out the video below.

Are you surprised that asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is rare? Will this new piece of data alter how you spend time with others?