Birthdays linked to spread of Covid in areas with high infection rates, study says
Households that have recently had birthdays are around 30 per cent more likely to have a positive Covid infection in areas with high transmission of the virus, a new US study has said.
The research, published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday, found that those with birthdays had 8.6 more diagnoses per 10â¯000 individuals compared with households without, in areas with cases.
Researchers analysed 2.9 million households from the first 45 weeks of 2020 to assess the importance of small social gatherings in the spread of Covid-19.
“This study suggests that events that lead to small and informal social gatherings, such as birthdays, and in particular, children’s birthdays, are a potentially important source in Covid transmission,” the report says.
Alongside the impact of birthdays as a whole, the study also compared how infection rates were impacted by different types of birthdays such as adult and children parties.
Following an adult party, there were just 5.8 more positive tests per 10â¯000 persons in the following two weeks in areas of high transmission. Following a child’s party, this number jumped to 15.8.
Dr Chris Whaley, an author of the study and policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, nonprofit global policy think tank explained to USA Today that people are naturally inclined to believe friends and family aren’t infected.
He said: “There’s just been so much effort around formal times together, and less policy, and attention toward informal types of gatherings, but we actually show that that’s a pretty strong source of transmission.”
The authors stipulated that they did not know whether households had actually celebrated a birthday, but that they were used as a marker for the likelihood of household gatherings in the weeks surrounding the date.
Researchers said that there was not a decrease in infections around the time of birthdays in households that were placed under stay-at-home orders were in place, “suggesting that compliance with these policies for these particular events may be low”.
The study found that “the presence of a birthday within a household was associated with significantly greater Covid-19 diagnosis rates in those households in the 2 weeks after birthdays” and that this “increased with the prevalence of Covid-19 in a household’s county”.
Generally, infection rates have dropped to low levels across the US in recent weeks, with a number of states such as New York and Michigan deciding to fully reopen their economies.
However, the Delta variant on the virus which is thought to be between 40 per cent and 80 per cent more transmissible is causing growing concern among health experts as infections begin to rise in rural areas of Missouri and Kansas.
More than 33 million people have been infected with the novel coronavirus since the pandemic gripped the US last March, leading to the deaths of more than 600,000.
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