Someone in my house has COVID. How likely am I to catch it?
Throughout the pandemic, one of the biggest COVID risks has been sharing a house with someone who is infectious. Table of Contents How is household transmission measured? How has household transmission changed through the pandemic? Why has has the household secondary attack rate varied? Vaccination reduces transmission Given how contagious COVID is, especially more recent variants, you’d imagine if you lived with someone who has COVID it would be inevitable you’d get infected. But this isn’t the case. A recent study suggests you have a 42.7% chance of catching COVID from a housemate who tests positive to Omicron. That means if someone introduced the Omicron variant to a household of six, you would expect two of the remaining five household members, on average, to become infected. 1. How is household transmission measured? We use the “secondary attack rate” to describe the average number of secondary infections among a group of exposed people, once a virus has been introduced i...