Contact tracing study finds that children more likely to contract Covid from other children

Some very interesting findings.

A recent contact tracing study has found a number of new results regarding the spread of Covid. Among these results it was found that children and young adults were much more likely to contract coronavirus from people their own age than older adults. Researchers from the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI), Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, worked with public health officials in the southeast Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh to track the infection pathways. It is the largest contact tracing study conducted in the world for any disease to date. The researchers found that the chances of a person with coronavirus, regardless of their age, passing it on to a close contact ranged from 2.6 per cent in the community to 9 per cent in the household. The researchers found that children and young adults, who made up one-third of COVID cases, were especially key to transmitting the virus in the studied populations. Speaking about their findings Lead researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan said;

“Kids are very efficient transmitters in this setting, which is something that hasn’t been firmly established in previous studies. We found that reported cases and deaths have been more concentrated in younger cohorts than we expected based on observations in higher-income countries.”

Children and young adults were much more likely to contract coronavirus from people their own age, the study found, but this was found to be true among all age groups, with adults more likely to catch it from their peers. The overall probability of catching coronavirus ranged from 4.7 per cent for low-risk contacts up to 10.7 per cent for high-risk contacts.