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BREAKING: Massive new study out of #India is the first of the scale in a low or middle income country.
Key insights: shorter median hospital stay before death; kids of all ages can get infected and spread; confirms "superspreading" 1/x https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/health/covid-india-children.html
Key insights: shorter median hospital stay before death; kids of all ages can get infected and spread; confirms "superspreading" 1/x https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/health/covid-india-children.html
First: Covid patients in India have a median stay of just 5 days in a hospital before death, vs 2-8 wks elsewhere. Important insight for outbreak planning, but also perhaps a sad statement on how late into their illness people get care. 2/x
They see the same increase in mortality among men and with age, but weirdly, the age risk goes down after 65 (and not just because of population distribution). Maybe because people who get past that age in India tend to be well off and have good health care 3/x
An amazing strength of this study is the HUGE numbers of people for whom they traced contacts. Nearly 87K cases, nearly 600K contacts. And as someone who grew up in India, that just blows me away 4/x
They didn't get to all contacts, of course, nor did they get enough epi info for all contacts. So it's tough to compare different groups in terms of infectivity. BUT... they did see enough to be able to draw some conclusions. 5/x
For eg, they saw that people tend to spread the virus to others of a similar age. Particularly true for school-aged kids, who get infected and transmit, for sure. But also seem to spread it most to kids of similar ages. 6/x
And they also saw, as many others have, that a small proportion of people seed the most infections. A whopping 71% didn't seem to to transmit to anyone at all. 7/x
There is SO much to unpack in this study, tried to do it all. Please read the article. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/health/covid-india-children.html
Massive thanks to @jLewnard who led the study, and to @ashishkjha @KrutikaKuppalli and Jeffrey Shaman for putting it all into perspective https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/health/covid-india-children.html
