South Korean epidemiologists have found that people were more likely to contract the new coronavirus from members of their own households than from contacts 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 had tested positive for the coronavirus and more than 59,000 people who came into contact with them. The findings showed that less than 2 per cent of patients’ non-household contacts had caught the virus, while nearly 12pc of patients’ household contacts had contracted the disease.
By age group, the infection rate within the household was higher when the first confirmed cases were teenagers or people in their 60s and 70s.
Children with COVID-19 were also more likely to be asymptomatic than adults, which made it harder to identify index cases within that group.
