A study considering half-a-million people who were exposed to the novel coronavirus in India suggests that only a small percentage of people, also called super spreaders, are driving the pandemic in the country, said a paper published on September 30 in the journal Science .

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The researchers further revealed that the super spreaders are mostly the young, including children.

To conduct the largest-ever study on any disease, researchers from the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI), Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California-Berkeley collaborated with public health officials in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

For the study, the researchers tracked the infection routes and fatality rate among 575,071 individuals who were exposed to 84,965 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2.

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The researchers found that 71 per cent of Covid-19 infected individuals did not infect any of their contacts. However, a mere 8 per cent of infected individuals accounted for 60 per cent of new infections.

Rule rather than exception

Lead researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan, a senior research scholar at PEI, said in the study: “Our study presents the largest empirical demonstration of super spreading that we are aware of in any infectious disease."

"Superspreading events are the rule rather than the exception when one is looking at the spread of Covid-19, both in India and likely in all affected places," he added.

Researchers also noted in their study that coronavirus-related deaths in India occurred, on average, six days after hospitalisation compared to an average of 13 days in the US.

They further said these deaths are most prevalent among people aged 50-64, which is slightly younger than the 60-plus at-risk population in the US.

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The researchers also added in their paper that the chances of a Covid-19 person, regardless of their age, transmitting the virus to their close contact is between 2.6 per cent in the community to 9 per cent in the household.

Further, they said, kids, who account for one-third of the cases in the country, are especially key to transmitting the virus in resource-limited populations.

Efficient transmitters

“Kids are very efficient transmitters in this setting, which is something that hasn't been firmly established in previous studies," Laxminarayan said.

"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 noted.

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