The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Coronavirus: how likely are you to infect your loved ones?

2020-05-04T19:02:28.018Z


Amaury Lambert, mathematician at the Collège de France, is piloting a large survey to assess the risk of contamination within the same foye


Each morning, Frédéric goes to breathe the rosemary from his garden and makes sure that his sense of smell has not (re) failed him. A month ago, he disappeared and gave way to a mixture of cough, fatigue and fever. At the same time, Pacôme, her 3-month-old baby, started to cough and was briefly hospitalized for pneumonia. But neither Camille, his wife, nor Romane, their three-and-a-half-year-old elder, showed signs of the Covid-19. "In the end, we do not know who had what and who passed it to whom," summarizes the fifty-year-old sportsman from Le Touquet (Pas-de-Calais), who is now back on his feet.

Knowing more about how the virus spreads within the same family is the objective of a freshly launched investigation under the name of Alcov2 - a mixture of the alcove where everyone is confined and Sars-Cov- 2, the name of the coronavirus. It is not based on serological tests but on mathematical models. "How likely am I to infect someone in my household?" How many will I infect? What is the share of asymptomatics in the home? We want to establish, ”explains Amaury Lambert, the pilot of the team made up of mathematicians, statisticians and epidemiologists from the Collège de France, the Sorbonne University and even the CNRS.

But to do his calculations and modeling, the researcher needs ... you. Each family, one of whose members has experienced one or more symptoms of the disease since mid-February (fever, cough, loss of taste, tiredness ... without any certainty that this is linked to Covid) is invited to complete an online questionnaire: height, weight, presence of chronic pathology, smoking etc., then the progression of clinical signs in the outbreak. At least 10,000 responses are expected.

"Our homes as mini-centers of the epidemic"

Frédéric has already participated. "Spread is the heart of the matter," he says. I find this combination of math and science very interesting. "There are a lot of parameters to look at. For example, alternate care: do they increase the risk of transmission or decrease it because the child stays in each home for a shorter time? "Continues Amaury Lambert.

For the moment, only a survey in the homes of the Oise by the Pasteur Institute has made it possible to reflect intra-family results. Thanks to blood samples taken from high school students and their relatives, we have seen that the circulation of the virus differs considerably. For parents, the risk of being infected was 9%, if their child was not infected, but 17%, if he was. For siblings, these figures jumped from 3 to 21%. The various studies in progress, including that of Amaury Lambert, should make it possible to refine: "It is not the same thing in terms of strategy if, in a vacuum, the virus circulates at 5, 20 or 80%" , observes the researcher.

"Our homes are like mini-centers of the epidemic," confirms Elisabeth Bouvet, professor of infectious diseases. They reproduce its operation. For example, one might think that her husband was not infected whereas, asymptomatic, it was he who transmitted the disease to us. Or vice versa! Clearly, observing the outbreaks is a good key to understanding the virus. "

Source: leparis

All life articles on 2020-05-04

You may like

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.