Teens and Tweens Are Fastest COVID-19 Spreaders, New Study Finds

In the debate over how to safely reopen schools and effective strategies to keep kids, teachers, school staff and extended family members safe, a new study from South Korea sheds light on the possible consequences of hastily reopening schools.
The large study found that older children, mainly teens and tweens, are more likely to spread the virus than young children or adults, as Bloomberg reported. That means that kids going to high school and middle school are likely to pass the virus amongst each other and then bring it home, even if they do not have any symptoms.
The findings suggest that as schools reopen, communities will start to see clusters of infection take root that include children of all ages, several experts told The New York Times.
"I fear that there has been this sense that kids just won't get infected or don't get infected in the same way as adults and that, therefore, they're almost like a bubbled population," said Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota.
To conduct the study, researchers from the South Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied contact tracing reports from 59,073 contacts of 5,706 COVID-19 patients, as The New York Post reported. The scientists found that that kids nine years old and younger had much lower rates of transmitting the virus in their households.
For people who lived with patients between the ages of 10 and 19, 18.6 percent tested positive for the virus within about 10 days after the initial case was detected. That was the highest rate of transmission among the groups studied, according to Bloomberg. Children younger than 10 spread the virus at the lowest rate, clocking in at a 5.3 percent transmission rate, though researchers warned that could change when schools reopen.
"Rates were higher for contacts of children than adults," they study authors wrote, as The New York Post reported. "These risks largely reflected transmission in the middle of mitigations and therefore might characterize transmission dynamics during school closure."
The study was rigorous and through, as it indexed patients by age (0–9, 10–19, 20–29, 30–39, 40–49, 50–59, 60–69, 70–79, and > 80 years). Amongst those groups, the households with someone in the 10-19 range had the highest rate of infection spread to other household contacts, according to the study. However, there was a limitation since those infected are less likely than adults to show symptoms, so the study may have underestimated the number of children who set off the chain of transmission within their households, according to The New York Times.
It also found that the most common spread of the virus was between household contacts, as Science Alert reported.
"Higher household than non-household detection might partly reflect transmission during social distancing, when family members largely stayed home except to perform essential tasks, possibly creating spread within the household," the researchers explained in their study, according to Science Alert.
As The New York Times pointed out, several studies from Europe and Asia have suggested that young children are less likely to get infected and to spread the virus. But most of those studies were small and flawed, said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
The new study "is very carefully done, it's systematic and looks at a very large population," Dr. Jha said to The New York Times. "It's one of the best studies we've had to date on this issue."
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There were many lessons to be learned from Texas' prolonged periods of lost power during its cold snap, which saw temperatures drop into the single digits. But one many people may not recognize is that electric vehicles, or EVs, can be part of a smart resiliency plan — not only in the case of outages triggered by the cold but in other scenarios caused by extreme weather events, from fire-related blackouts in California to hurricane-hit power losses in Puerto Rico.
A car driving in the snow in Dallas, Feb. 2021. Matthew Rader / CC BY-SA 4.0
<p>Experts recognize that electric vehicles are a central climate solution for their role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But EVs are also essentially batteries on wheels. You can store energy in those batteries, and if EVs are equipped with something called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid" target="_blank">vehicle-to-grid</a> or vehicle-to-building technology, they can also be used to keep the lights on in emergencies. The technology allows the energy being stored in an EV battery to be pushed back into the grid or into buildings to provide power.</p><p>There are hurdles: The technology is still <a href="https://www.greenbiz.com/article/vehicle-grid-technology-revving" target="_blank">developing</a>, the vast majority of EVs currently on the road do not have this capability, and utilities would need regulatory approval before bringing it to scale. But done right it could be a great opportunity.</p><p>Electric car batteries can hold approximately <a href="https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/11/how-california-can-use-electric-vehicles-keep-lights" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">60 kilowatt hours (kWh)</a> of energy, enough to provide back-up power to an average U.S. household for two days. Larger electric vehicles like buses and trucks have even bigger batteries and can provide more power. The American company Proterra produces electric buses that can store <a href="https://www.proterra.com/press-release/proterra-launches-zx5-electric-bus/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">up to 660 kWh of energy</a>. Electric <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/electric-trash-trucks-are-coming-quietly-to-your-town-11602098620#:~:text=Electric%20trash%20truck%20love%20is%20in%20the%20air.&text=A's%20program%20to%20reduce%20carbon,being%20primarily%20electric%20by%202023." target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">garbage trucks</a> and even <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/business/electric-semi-trucks-big-rigs.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">big-rigs</a>, with bigger batteries, are becoming a reality too.</p>MTA New York City Transit / Marc A. Hermann / CC BY 2.0
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