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Household Transmission Dynamics of Seasonal Human Coronaviruses
Talia M Quandelacy1, Matt D T Hitchings2, Justin Lessler3
1Department of Epidemiology, University of Colorado Denver, Aurora, Colorado, USA.
Background:
Household transmission studies inform how viruses spread among close contacts, but few characterize household transmission of endemic coronaviruses.
Methods:
We used data collected from 223 households with school-age children participating in weekly disease surveillance over 2 respiratory virus seasons (December 2015 to May 2017), to describe clinical characteristics of endemic human coronaviruses (HCoV-229E, HcoV-HKU1, HcoV-NL63, HcoV-OC43) infections, and community and household transmission probabilities using a chain-binomial model correcting for missing data from untested households.
Results:
Among 947 participants in 223 households, we observed 121 infections during the study, most commonly subtype HCoV-OC43. Higher proportions of infected children (<19 years) displayed influenza-like illness symptoms than infected adults (relative risk, 3.0; 95% credible interval [CrI], 1.5-6.9). The estimated weekly household transmission probability was 9% (95% CrI, 6-13) and weekly community acquisition probability was 7% (95% CrI, 5-10). We found no evidence for differences in community or household transmission probabilities by age or symptom status. Simulations suggest that our study was underpowered to detect such differences.
Conclusions:
Our study highlights the need for large household studies to inform household transmission, the challenges in estimating household transmission probabilities from asymptomatic individuals, and implications for controlling endemic CoVs.
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