Badly ventilated interiors and a lot of people: perfect conditions for the coronavirus.
US researchers found out where exactly most people contract Covid-19.
The main route of infection for Covid-19 is droplet infection: air contaminated with coronaviruses * hits the mucous membrane of the mouth or nose and thus penetrates the body.
A large-scale US study has now been able to use cell phone movement data from 98 million Americans to show where most people were infected with Covid-19.
Around 80 percent of the infections were due to only ten percent of the places
where people were staying.
Curbing the corona pandemic is a difficult undertaking, especially in winter: people are increasingly staying in closed, mostly not well-ventilated rooms, which drastically increases the risk of infection.
Researchers around the world are concerned with the question of where people are more likely to be infected with coronaviruses.
An analysis of anonymized cell phone data from 98 million Americans now showed the hotspots - so-called
super-spreader locations, where most Covid-19 infections occurred
.
The research team from Stanford University in the United States and Northwestern University merged the anonymized mobile movement data in a computer model and was able to calculate
the locations in which corona infection rates were higher
.
It was data from people who moved between March and May 2020 in ten of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States, including New York and Los Angeles.
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: Corona research: so many people infect super spreaders on average.
Coronavirus: "Up to 80 percent of the infections were due to only ten percent of the locations"
The US researchers fed their computer model with the whereabouts of the people, with the number of those they encountered and the number of reported Covid-19 cases.
According to Der Spiegel, the model learned to predict the likelihood of infection in the various cities using the mobility data.
"
We can simulate where and when people get infected,
" quotes Spiegel Serina Chang, who was involved in the study: "Up to 80 percent of the infections were due to just ten percent of the locations."
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These were locations where larger groups of people stayed for a longer period of time.
Among other things,
restaurants, cafes and fitness studios
are mentioned here
.
"We have found that a reduction in the number of people in one place significantly reduces the risk of infection," Spiegel.de quoted David Grusky from Stanford University in California.
If fewer people were in restaurants and gyms, they could also be prevented from being closed completely as part of lockdowns, as the researchers note.
For example, the number of new infections could be reduced by a full 80 percent if the utilization of public places in the greater Chicago area was reduced by 20 percent in the computer model.
(jg) * Merkur.de belongs to the Germany-wide Ippen-Digital editorial network
.
To the study
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