ADULTS living with kids have just a four per cent extra risk of catching Covid, a new study has found.
It comes as week after school reopened their doors in Britain, giving comfort to nervous parents.
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People under 65 living with children were also found to be at no extra risk of death from Covid in the first and second waves, research in the BMJ revealed.
After poring through health records for 12 million adults, researchers estimated the number of people with the virus rose from 810 to between 850-870 per 10,000 people living with kids aged 0-11 years.
Prof Liam Smeeth, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: “I think it would be consistent to say that what we see is it’s likely that kids do play a role in spreading the virus and that it’s likely that more kids going to school play a role in increasing risk of exposure to the virus.
“But the impact of that in terms of health outcomes overall is very small.
“The important thing here is that we’ve shown it doesn’t translate into major cases of severe cases of Covid.”
Another study on Scottish healthcare workers found adults living with children are at no greater risk of catching Covid – even when schools are open.
The risk of testing positive was lower for those adults living in a household with a child between 0 and 11, than it was for households without young children.
And it was lower still for adults who lived in households with two or more children under 11 years old.
Experts think kids could actually offer a protective effect against coronavirus infection in households, but the theory needs further probing.
Dr Rachael Wood Clinical lead for Maternal and Child Health at Public Health Scotland, and an author of the study, said: “This study adds to existing evidence on the limited role that children play in the transmission of Covid-19.
“More work is needed to explore the idea that living with children might offer adults some protection from infection, but what we can already safely say is that children are not major drivers of Covid-19 transmission.”
