Children, along with young adults have emerged as COVID-19 ‘superspreaders’ according to a study report.
As per the study titled ‘‘Epidemiology and transmission dynamics of COVID-19 in two Indian states’ published in journal Science highlights that children and young adults are in-fact the ‘superspreaders’ of the novel COVID-19 coronavirus.
The study has been conducted and compiled by researchers from Princeton Environmental Institute, Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley.
The study report comprises of analysis of over 500,000 people in Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh which reflected children as being the key to virus spread, especially within households.
According to Ramanan Laxminarayan – senior research scholar at the Princeton Environmental Institute, 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,” he said.
Furthermore, the report highlights that only 8 per cent of infected individuals have been found responsible for 60 per cent of the new reported infections.
It is to be noted that India has report second highest COVID-19 cases with more than 6.6 million infections, and 102,685 casualties – the third highest death toll after USA and Brazil.
Global COVID-19 tally stands at 34,973,117 cases with 1,030,731 deaths so far.
