Children are unlikely to have been the primary source of household SARS-CoV-2 infections

Yanshan Zhu; Conor J Bloxham; Katina D Hulme; Jane E Sinclair; Zhen Wei Marcus Tong; Lauren E Steele; Ellesandra C Noye; Jiahai Lu; Keng Yih Chew; Janessa Pickering; Charles Gilks; Asha C Bowen; Kirsty R Short

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.26.20044826 doi: medRxiv preprint of the home than adults and are therefore less likely to be index cases. This may be magnified in countries which have implemented school closures in an attempt to control the outbreak. However, it is worth noting that Singapore did not mandate the closure of schools and yet still did not detect any household clusters of transmission of SARS-CoV-2 with children as the index case. 13, 67 Similarly, should children have fewer interactions outside the home it would suggest that children would be unlikely to be the index case in any household transmission event. In contrast, our analysis of household transmission clusters of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza show that children were frequently the index case. Whether this difference simply reflects the different route of transmission of these infections (poultry-to-human vs person-to-person spread) remains to be determined.