New study: More people are getting Covid-19 at home

South Korean epidemiologists have found that people are more likely to catch the new coronavirus from members of their own household than from outsiders.  

A study published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on July 16 looked at details of 5,706 'index' patients who tested positive for the coronavirus and more than 59,000 people who came into contact with them.

The authors found that less than 2% of patients were people who had contact with outsiders, while nearly 12% of patients were people who had contact with family members and had contracted the disease.

Passengers at Incheon International Airport, South Korea. (Source: Xinhua)

By age group, infection rates among household members were higher when the first confirmed case was a teenager or someone in their 60s and 70s.

This is probably because these age groups are more likely to be in close contact with other family members because they need more protection or support, Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) and one of the study's authors, said at a press conference.

Children aged 9 and under were less likely to be patients on the list, said Associate Professor Choe Young-june of Hallym University College of Medicine, who co-led the study. However, he noted that the 29 samples studied were small compared to the 1,695 samples of people aged 20 to 29.

Children with Covid-19 are more likely to be asymptomatic than adults, making it harder to identify cases within the group.

'The age difference is not significant when it comes to Covid-19. Children may be less likely to be infected with the virus, but our data are not enough to confirm this hypothesis ,' Choe said.

Data for the study was collected from January 20 to March 27, when the novel coronavirus was spreading exponentially and when the number of daily cases in South Korea peaked.