Non-vaccinated people are less likely to get Covid-19 if family members have got jabs: Study | World news
The more family members who have immunity to coronavirus disease (Covid-19), either from a previous infection or full vaccination, the less the chance for other non-immune individuals in the household to suffer from the infection and the hospital stay, a new nationwide study in Sweden has revealed .
The study results identified a dose-response relationship between the number of immune members in a family and the risk of infection and hospitalization in the non-immune family members. It found that non-immune individuals had a 45% to 97% lower risk of infection and hospitalization when the number of immune family members increased, the researchers said.
The results of the study, says Peter Nordstrom, professor at Sweden’s Umeå University, strongly suggest that Covid-19 vaccination is “important not only for individual protection, but also to reduce transmission, especially in families, which is a high-risk environment for transmission. “
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This latest research – which differs from several available studies on how Covid-19 vaccination significantly limits the risk of contracting the virus, according to the researchers – is a registry-based study. More than 1.8 million people from over 800,000 families in Sweden participated in the study.
The researchers combined register data from the Swedish Public Health Agency, the National Board of Health and Welfare and from Statistics Sweden – government agencies that monitor statistical data. Following this, the association between the number of family members in a household with immunity to coronavirus and the risk of infection and hospitalization in non-immune humans was quantified.
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Marcel Ballin, a doctoral student at Umeå and co-author of the study, said that vaccination against Covid-19 also “minimizes … the risk of more people becoming critically ill” and the new variants that “appear and begin to take over.”
On the basis of the Swedish population, the study reported differences in age, grouping within families, socio-economic status and several diagnoses that were previously seen as risk factors for Covid-19.
(With inputs from PTI)