The Coronavirus — Birthday Connection

A new study suggests you’re significantly more likely to get COVID-19 in the two weeks after your birthday.

On March 6th, 2020, I attended a birthday party for my friend Doug.

Though we didn’t know it at the time, this would be the last time we’d gather for a birthday for more than a year. The next week, with the first COVID cases appearing in Connecticut, the world shut down. It’s only now starting up again.

The folks who were at that party all remember it in the same way, as a sort of gauzy past before the realities of the present came crashing down. If we only knew.

Fortunately, no one at that party got COVID. Well, at least not from the party. But small gatherings like Doug’s party are a potential important source of transmission, though this has been really hard to measure. At least, unless you get clever, which is what a team led by Anupam Jena did in this article, appearing in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Birthdays are the key, it turns out. See, birthdays are pretty random.