Kids are key COVID-19 superspreaders: study

Children and young adults are efficient superspreaders of coronavirus, reveals the largest contact tracing study conducted of the virus to date.

Titled ‘Epidemiology and transmission dynamics of COVID-19 in two Indian states’, the paper has been published in the journal Science, compiled by researchers from Princeton Environmental Institute, Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley.

For the paper, the scientists studied more than half-million people in the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Young adults and children, it noted, are much more important in transmitting the deadly virus, especially within households.

Ramanan Laxminarayan, a senior research scholar at the Princeton Environmental Institute, told the university’s publication that the paper is the first large study to capture the extraordinary extent to which SARS-CoV-2 depends on “superspreading”, where a few pass the virus on to a large number of people.

As per the research, a mere 8% of infected individuals had accounted for 60% of new infections.

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

The paper also found the first large-scale evidence that the nationwide lockdown in India had led to a substantial reductions in the spread of the virus.