Household visitation during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed novel risks related to the indoor mixing of individuals from different households and challenged policymakers to adequately regulate this behaviour. While in many cases household visits are necessary for the purpose of social care, they have been linked to broadening community transmission of the virus. In this study we propose a novel, privacy-preserving framework for the measurement of household visitation at national and regional scales, making use of passively collected mobility data. We implement this approach in England from January 2020 to May 2021. The measures expose significant spatial and temporal variation in household visitation patterns, impacted by both national and regional lockdown policies, and the rollout of the vaccination programme. The findings point to complex social processes unfolding differently over space and time, likely informed by variations in policy adherence, vaccine relaxation, and regional interventions.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Ross, S. Breckenridge, G. Zhuang, M. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4546-1033 Manley, E.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Published: December 2021 Published (online): 25 November 2021 Accepted: 3 November 2021
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Information School (Sheffield)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	30 Nov 2021 08:55
Last Modified:	30 Nov 2021 08:55
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Nature
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41598-021-02092-7
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:180988

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Household visitation during the COVID-19 pandemic

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