COVID-19: Birthdays of children indoors are among the activities most at risk of contagion

It has already been confirmed that more than 178 million people worldwide have contracted the coronavirus infection. There have been more than 3.8 million deaths from the COVID-19 disease, according to the World Health Organization registry. The virus continues to spread around the world, and scientific research continues to uncover what activities and places are contributing to the coronavirus continuing to affect more people. Meetings in closed spaces to celebrate birthdays, especially for children, would be one of the riskiest times.

A study published a few days ago in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine of the American Medical Association revealed that The celebrations of children’s birthdays in a closed environment are meetings that promote the contagion of the coronavirus. Although social gatherings in closed places are known to increase the risk of coronavirus contagion, the published study is one of the first to provide data on birthday celebrations.

The authors of the study were Christopher Whaley, Jonathan Cantor, Megan Pera and Anupam Jena, who is part of the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard University School of Medicine in the United States. They noted that many policies designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus target formal gatherings, such as workplaces and dining rooms.

However, “the social gatherings Informal forms are a potentially important mode of transmission of SARS-CoV-2, but the study of their role in transmission is hampered by data and methodological limitations ”. Researchers saw the anniversary celebrations as an opportunity to empirically quantify the potential role of small social gatherings in the spread of the coronavirus.

They designed a cross-sectional study that used National data from January 1 to November 8, 2020, from 2.9 million privately insured households in the United States to compare COVID-19 infections between households with and without birthdays over the previous two weeks. They stratified the prevalence of COVID-19 at the county level that week and adjusted for household size and differences specific to week and county.

The study also compared how infection rates associated with birthdays differed depending on the type of birthdays (eg, children’s or adult birthdays, or a milestone like a person’s 50th birthday) and county-level precipitation on Saturdays of each week (leading to meetings held indoors), county political trends, and state shelter-in-place policies.

Therefore, Researchers found that among the 2.9 million households in the study, in the top decile of counties for COVID-19 prevalence, households with a birthday in the previous 2 weeks had 8.6 more diagnoses. per 10,000 people compared to households that did not have a birthday in the previous 2 weeks. This means a 31% relative increase from the county-level prevalence of 27.8 cases per 10,000 people, compared to 0.9 more diagnoses per 10,000 people in the fifth decile.

Households in the 10th decile of COVID-19 prevalence saw an increase in COVID-19 diagnoses of 15.8 per 10,000 people after a child’s birthday, compared to an increase of 5.8 per 10,000 among households with an adult birthday. No differences were found for birthdays, county political leanings, rainfall, or shelter-in-place policies.

“This cross-sectional study suggests that birthdays, which likely correspond to social gatherings and celebrations, were associated with higher rates of COVID-19 infection diagnosed within households in counties with high COVID-19 prevalence. emphasize the authors. These times promote infections because the coronavirus can be transmitted not only when an infected person coughs or sneezes very close to another but also when speaking, screaming or singing more than 2 meters away.

Since last year, it has been recommended to avoid social gatherings inside closed environments in the context of the pandemic. Last year, a group of 239 scientists told the WHO it should consider the coronavirus to be transmitted through the air as well.

“One of the reasons is that a person can be infected with the coronavirus and not have any symptoms. But when you breathe out or speak, it emits aerosols that contain the coronavirus. The problem is that others see this person as a healthy person and if they share a space like an office, school or transportation, they can contract the infection. It is still difficult to recognize that the coronavirus is also in the air ”, Told Infobae in an interview José Luis Jiménez, who has a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and research at the University of Colorado in Boulder, United States.

When people are outside, there are fewer infections. Because the air is renewed naturally. Although even outdoors you have to be two meters away and with a chin strap. For it, when people are in closed environments, they must have permanent ventilation. “It has long been well known that ventilation has worked for the prevention of different diseases such as tuberculosis since 1940,” Giménez said.

In many situations where birthdays take place, people participate without knowing they are infected. They are asymptomatic, but can transmit the virus. There were also instances where people knew about her diagnosis but still attended the celebration. As happened last April in the municipality of La Rubia, a municipality located in the center-west of Santa Fe of only 400 inhabitants which has been shaken in recent days by an event that has outraged the population. A family learned that two of its members had been infected with the coronavirus and still decided to throw a birthday party for one of the girls.

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