A study by South Korean epidemiologists has found out 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 just two out of 100 infected people had caught the virus from non-household contacts, while one in 10 had contracted the disease from their own families.
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.
The study also found out, among other things, that children with COVID-19 were more likely to be asymptomatic than adults, which made it harder to identify index cases within that group.
Data for the study was collected between January 20 and March 27, when the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), which causes the respiratory illness called COVID-19, was spreading exponentially and as daily infections in South Korea reached their peak.