China convinced the world COVID-19 was a naturally occurring virus but even agencies who were initially taken in are now pointing to the virus laboratory in Wuhan, writes Paul Baldwin.
This theory has been undercut by international research, and U.S. biostatistics researchers have now added domestic confirmation.
The American Medical Association’s
JAMA Network Open published their research earlier this month, finding that the riskiest environment for viral transmission – the home – is not particularly risky when the infected person is not symptomatic.
The five researchers sought to identify the “household secondary attack rate” for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Secondary attack rate refers to the number of new cases among contacts divided by the total number of contacts.
Four of the five are in the University of Florida’s Department of Biostatistics, while the fifth is in the University of Washington’s Department of Biostatistics and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
Mon, 28 Dec 2020 18:54 UTC
University of Florida Department of Biostatistics Four researchers from the University of Florida Department of Biostatistics co-authored a study published online by the
Journal of the American Medical Association. They performed a meta-analysis of 54 studies looking at the household secondary attack rate of SARS-CoV-2. According to the CDC, the secondary attack rate is the number of new cases among contacts divided by the total number of contacts.
The researchers confirmed that SARS-CoV-2 is more contagious than other coronaviruses, with a secondary attack rate of 16.6% (95% CI 14.0%-19.3%) compared to 7.5% (95%CI 4.8%-10.7%) for SARS-CoV and 4.7% (95%CI, 0.9%-10.7%) for MERS-CoV.