My sibling has tested positive for COVID 19.
How likely is it to spread to others in my family?
That's a good question.
And one we didn't have an answer to early on in the pandemic.
There were a lot of questions about how the SARS-CoV-2 virus was spread.
Our team at the CHEO Emergency Department wanted to help
answer the question about how the virus was transmitted within homes
and what role children played in its transmission.
We enrolled 180 households from the Ottawa area
between September 2020 and March 2021.
Every home had to have had at least one child within the home,
and there had to have been at least one person who tested positive for COVID 19.
What we discovered was that approximately 50% of household
members were infected from the first infected individual
and that children were an important source of that spread.
Although kids were less likely to spread the virus compared to adults in the home,
both children and adults were equally likely
to become infected from the first infected individual.
Although we are at a different stage of the pandemic now,
with more infectious variants circulating, it's still important
to understand how the virus is spread within the house.
We should be using our layers of protection,
such as masking and becoming fully vaccinated against COVID 19
to protect those who are vulnerable around us.