For just over a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nature highlighted key papers and preprints to help readers keep up with the flood of coronavirus research. Those highlights are below. For continued coverage of important COVID-19 developments, go to Nature’s30 April — One vaccine dose can nearly halve transmission risk
A single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine made by either Pfizer or AstraZeneca cuts a person’s risk of transmitting SARS-CoV-2 to their closest contacts by as much as half, according to an analysis of more than 365,000 households in the United Kingdom.Although the vaccines have been shown to reduce COVID-19 symptoms and serious illness, their ability to prevent coronavirus transmission has been unclear. Kevin Dunbar, Gavin Dabrera and their colleagues at Public Health England in London looked for cases in which someone became infected with SARS-CoV-2 after receiving a dose of either vaccine (R. J. Harris et al. Preprint at Knowledge HubThey then assessed how often those individuals transmitted the virus to household contacts.
The team found that people who had been vaccinated for at least 21 days could still test positive for the virus. But viral transmission from these individuals to others in their households was 40–50% lower than transmission in households in which the first person to test positive had not been vaccinated. Results for the two vaccines were similar. The findings have not yet been peer reviewed29 April — A Chilean city’s COVID toll reflects its vast inequalities
In Santiago, COVID-19 dealt the hardest blow to people with low socioeconomic status, because of factors such as crowded households, a lack of health care and an inability to work from home.
Death rates were greater in low-income areas of Santiago, especially among people under age 80, than in high-income areas, according to research by Gonzalo Mena, at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleaguesThe team found several explanations for this disparity. Compared with higher-income areas, lower-income neighborhoods had high rates of positive SARS-CoV-2 tests. This suggests that testing there was inadequate — and therefore that efforts based on case numbers to curb the epidemic couldn’t be appropriately targeted.
Low-income areas had one-quarter as many hospital beds per 10,000 people as did wealthy areas. And a striking 90% of COVID-19 deaths in lower-income areas occurred outside of health-care facilities, compared with 55% in a more affluent area of the capital.
Finally, by using location data from mobile phones, the team found that people in low-income areas moved more during periods when residents were supposed to stay at home — possibly because more people had jobs outside of the house.28 April — Self-taken swabs can track a pandemic’s hidden patterns
Regular swabbing of a random sample of the population quickly detects the resurgence of SARS-CoV-2 infections, even in young adults.
Steven Riley and Paul Elliott at Imperial College London and their colleagues tested nose and throat samples from 594,000 randomly selected UK residents, who swabbed themselves or their children between 1 May and 8 September 2020The study found that, during that time, the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate dipped as low as 0.04% in the tested population — down from around 5% in early 2020 at the height of the United Kingdom’s first wave — and then began climbing to a peak of about 0.13% in the final round of testing.
Prevalence rates early in the second wave were highest among young adults aged 18–24, at 0.25%, compared with 0.04% among those aged 65 and older. This suggests that increased socializing by younger people probably drove the resurgence. These age patterns were not reflected in data from routine surveillance at health-service providers, which underestimated infection rates in younger age groups.
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