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Young adults and middle-aged people were responsible for the vast majority of the spread of COVID-19 in the United States last year, according to a new study.
People aged 20 to 49 led just under 72% of transmissions between February and October, according to a new study by scientists at Imperial College London.
People between the ages of 20 and 34 contributed about 35 percent of the spread, but older adults were responsible for an even larger share of the spread. People aged 35 to 49 accounted for over 41% of transmissions.
The study found that young children returning to school in the fall were probably not a major factor in the increase in infections seen in the fall. The United States was receiving more than 50,000 new cases per day in October, up from about 25,000 per day in mid-June.
Instead, as more Americans returned to relatively “ normal ” lives – children returned to school, young adults to work and college, middle-aged people returning to work – the movement in general has led to a sharp increase in COVID-19 cases.
Encouragingly, however, returning students did not result in more deaths, possibly because the virus is rarely fatal to children and young adults, who have relatively little contact with older people at risk.
And as the United States scrambles to vaccinate healthcare workers and the elderly against COVID-19, the authors of the new study suggest that vaccinating young adults and middle-aged people who are in the origin of the spread could be one of the best ways to avoid the future coronavirus. outbreaks.
But these groups are at the back of the pack and likely won’t get their first doses until late spring, unless they’re essential workers.
Americans aged 20 to 34 were responsible for almost 35% of the transmission of COVID-19 in the United States, and people aged 35 to 49 were responsible for almost half of the spread.
“ This study provides evidence that the resurgence of COVID-19 epidemics in the United States in 2020 was led by adults aged 20 to 49, and in particular adults aged 35 to 49, before and after the reopening of the school, ” the researchers from Imperial College London wrote.
Only 4% of the spread of the coronavirus has been attributed to children aged 10 to 19, and only 2.1% of transmissions have been linked to children nine and under.
The researchers also created models of how the disease would look if schools had remained closed.
Keeping schools closed would not have radically changed the trajectory of the pandemic, according to their study.
Over the summer, worried parents feared that sending their children back to school in the fall could be a catastrophic epidemic waiting to happen.
Cases of COVID-19 in the United States rose sharply in the fall after more people started returning to school – but experts at Imperial College London say restarting classes alone does not explain the increase in transmissions
The surge in infections among young people has not led to an increase in the number of deaths in their age bracket – but has fueled higher daily deaths among older and more at risk people, the researchers say.
But it’s now clear that children don’t transmit the virus to each other particularly often, and even when infected, they usually have mild or no symptoms (although there are exceptions).
However, children can “ sow ” infections in adults, who are more likely to pass the virus on to others, researchers at Imperial College have found.
“ As children and adolescents cause infections in the older age groups which are more efficient at transmission, as of October 2020 the opening of the school is associated with an estimated increase of 25.7% infections with COVID-19 and a 5.9% increase in COVID. -19 attributable deaths ”, they wrote in the article published Tuesday in the journal Science.
How schools tracked COVID-19 cases in their classrooms was also critical. The study found that the effects on the overall community and cases were more pronounced when there were actually six times as many COVID-19 infections as documented school reports.
Even so, the reopening of schools did not influence the spread of the coronavirus beyond what one would expect – only young and middle-aged adults outdid themselves.
Imperial College researchers say mass vaccinations for young people could prevent COVID-19 ‘resurgences’ and reduce infections and deaths – but the US only vaccinates around 1.3 million people a day, and young Americans are at the back of the pack
“ These results indicate that adults aged 20 to 34 and 35 to 49 continue to be the only age groups that contribute disproportionately to the spread of COVID19 relative to their size in the population and that the impact of reopening the school on the COVID-19 resurgence is most effectively mitigated. by strengthening disease control in adults between the ages of 20 and 49, ”the researchers wrote.
When states and schools reopened and people returned to work and the classroom, who was diagnosed with COVID-19 changed, but who was dying didn’t change.
Previous research from the CDC has shown the average age of a person who contracted coronavirus in May was 46.
In May, the average age fell to 38. It came after the share of infections among 20-29 year olds jumped to 20% between March and August.
But the distribution of deaths across age groups has remained “remarkably” stable, researchers at Imperial College found.
Combined with what they saw in transmission patterns, this suggests a few factors behind the upward trends in COVID-19 last year.
College students are more likely to attend classes in person and be “risk tolerant”: willing to risk infection to go to a party without a mask, for example.
However, researchers found that people between the ages of 20 and 34 alone were only disproportionately causing the spread of the coronavirus in certain parts of the country: the southern, southwestern, and western states.
Without the inclusion of 35 to 49 year olds, the increase in new infections is not fully explained.
This, in turn, suggested to researchers that it was not only the behavior of particularly young people, but the general increase in movement that spurred the spread of the coronavirus last fall.
“ Changes in mobility and behavior among the larger group of adults aged 20 to 49 are driving the resurgence of COVID-19 in the United States in 2020, ” the authors wrote. ‘study.
Indeed, they believe that his group generally mingles more often with other people outside their home – whether for work, school or social purposes – and that these interactions stimulate transmissions.
They also suggested that “mass vaccination” of 20 to 49 year olds could “bring the resurgence of COVID-19 epidemics under control and prevent deaths.”
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