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4 Important New Findings
A roundup of Covid-19 research from the past week
Published in
2 min readApr 2, 2020
- Mild symptoms, high spread: A new study published in Nature on Wednesday suggests that Covid-19 spreads most efficiently in the first week after infection, when people only have mild symptoms. Infectious virus particles were found in the throat and lungs of nine adults in a single hospital in Munich, Germany in the first week of infection. They weren’t, however, found in blood, urine, or stool samples, which supports the theory that the disease is not spread through stool. Whether the disease is rendered noninfectious after it enters the gut remains to be seen.
- Worse with age: The rates of hospitalization and death in people who caught Covid-19 in mainland China increased with age, according to a study published Monday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. For 19-year-olds, hospitalization rates varied from .04% in 10%. But in people 80 and older, the rate was 18.4%. Death rates showed a similar pattern: for kids aged zero to nine, it was 0.0016% — while for people 80 and up, it was 7.8%. The results support the observation that the disease hits older people the hardest.
- There’s an app for that: In the next few weeks, the British government plans to release an app that tracks the spread of Covid-19 and notifies people if they come too close to someone who’s tested positive for the disease, Sky News reported on Tuesday. On the same day, Science published a study from the University of Oxford exploring the efficacy and ethics of such an app, which suggested it could be faster than manually tracking the disease.
- 700,000 cases prevented: Measures taken by the Chinese government in the first 50 days of the Covid-19 pandemic likely prevented 700,000 cases or more of the disease nationwide, according to research published on Tuesday in Science. The international team of researchers show that the Wuhan travel ban and national emergency response that began on January 23 helped flatten the curve in the rest of the country.
