Age groups that sustain resurging COVID-19 epidemics in the United States

  1. Mélodie Monod
  2. Alexandra Blenkinsop
  3. Xiaoyue Xi
  4. Daniel Hebert
  5. Sivan Bershan
  6. Simon Tietze
  7. Marc Baguelin
  8. Valerie C. Bradley
  9. Yu Chen
  10. Helen Coupland
  11. Sarah Filippi
  12. Jonathan Ish-Horowicz
  13. Martin McManus
  14. Thomas Mellan
  15. Axel Gandy
  16. Michael Hutchinson
  17. H. Juliette T. Unwin
  18. Sabine L. van Elsland
  19. Michaela A. C. Vollmer
  20. Sebastian Weber
  21. Harrison Zhu
  22. Anne Bezancon
  23. Neil M. Ferguson
  24. Swapnil Mishra
  25. Seth Flaxman
  26. Samir Bhatt
  27. Oliver Ratmann
  28. on behalf of the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team

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Abstract

How can the resurgent epidemics of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) during 2020 be explained? Are they a result of students going back to school? To address this question, Monod et al. created a contact matrix for infection based on data collected in Europe and China and extended it to the United States. Early in the pandemic, before interventions were widely implemented, contacts concentrated among individuals of similar age were the highest among school-aged children, between children and their parents, and between middle-aged adults and the elderly. However, with the advent of nonpharmaceutical interventions, these contact patterns changed substantially. By mid-August 2020, although schools reopening facilitated transmission, the resurgence in the United States was largely driven by adults 20 to 49 years of age. Thus, working adults who need to support themselves and their families have fueled the resurging epidemics in the United States.

Science , this issue p. eabe8372

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  1. Version published to 10.1126/science.abe8372
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.18.20197376: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

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    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

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    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.09.18.20197376v1 on medRxiv