Epidemiologists from South Korea have found that the people had more chances of contracting the new coronavirus or COVID-19 from the members of their own households than from getting it outside the home. A study published in the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on July 16 looked in detail at 5,706 'index patients' who got tested positive coronavirus and over 59,000 people who came into contact with them.
The results proved that two out of 100 people who got infected had caught the virus from the non-household contacts, while one among 10 had contracted the disease from their own households. By the age group, the rate of the infection within the household was more when the first confirmed cases were teenagers or people in their 60s and 70s.
"This is probably because these age groups are more likely to be in close contact with family members as the group is in more need of protection or support," the director of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), Jeong Eun-kyeong, and another author of these study, mentioned in a briefing.
COVID-19 Spread
Children who are aged nine and below were at least likely to be the index patient, mentioned Dr. Choe Young-june, a Hallym University College of Medicine assistant professor who also led the work, even though he noted that the sample size of 29 was small compared to the 1,695 20-to-29-year-olds investigated.
Children with coronavirus had more chances of being asymptomatic than adults, which made it harder to understand the index cases within that group. "The difference in the age group has no huge significance when it comes to contracting COVID-19. Children could be less likely to transmit the virus, but our data is not enough to confirm this hypothesis," mentioned Choe.
The data of the research got collected between January 20 and March 27, when the new virus was spreading exponentially and as daily cases of infections in South Korea reached their peak. The virus outbreak has created a major stir around the world in recent times infecting more than 14.7 million people worldwide and claimed the lives of more than 610,000 people in more than 170 countries.
