Why Do I Keep Getting COVID-19 But Those Around Me Don ’t?

COVID-19 doesn’t always affect people the same way. If someone gets sick, for example, not everyone in that person’s close social circle will get infected—even if they recently spent time together. But why? In a paper recently published in Nature Communications, researchers delve into the different factors at play, from genetics to public health interventions, all of which affect how a virus spreads from one person to another. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] They found that at the beginning of the pandemic, environmental factors like social distancing, isolation, hand washing, mask wearing, and vaccination played a bigger role in whether people got infected, while over time, genetic factors have become more important. Now, genetics may account for anywhere from 30% to 70% of one’s chance of getting COVID-19, they concluded. To reach that estimate, the researchers studied the health records from more than 12,000 people (who came from about 5,600 families total) who tested positive for COVID-19 at a large New York City hospital from Feb. 2020 to Oct. 2021. To capture the role that non-genetic factors, such as a person’s environment, play in their chance of getting infected with the virus or how severely ill they got if they were infected, they also categorized each person’s potential exposure by weighing factors like who lived in their household, contact with their extended family, and what kind of housing they had. Re...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news