PETALING JAYA: About 70%-80% of the Covid-19 patients in Sabah are highly contagious despite being asymptomatic or showing mild symptoms, says health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah.

He said this was because the virus load was higher in the body during the early stages, Bernama reported.

“The lower Cycle Threshold (CT) values in the Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests of positive Covid-19 patients in the third wave of infections currently could mean that they were being detected at an earlier, highly infectious phase.

“A lower CT value meant that the disease was still highly contagious,” Noor Hisham was quoted as saying during his virtual press conference yesterday.

However, he did not rule out the possibility that the high infectivity level could be due to a mutation of the virus.

Noor Hisham said the CT value for cases in Sabah and Kedah may be lower because the patients had the D614G mutation of the virus, suggesting it could be why the infection had spread more easily.

“That is why we have isolated patients in some quarantine and low-risk treatment centres for 14 days because the infectivity will usually decrease after 10 days,” he was quoted as saying by the news agency.