Pung, R., Firth, J.A., Russell, T.W. et al. (3 more authors) (2024) Temporal contact patterns and the implications for predicting superspreaders and planning of targeted outbreak control. Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 21 (221). 20240358. ISSN 1742-5689
Abstract
Directly transmitted infectious diseases spread through social contacts that change over time, but outbreak models typically make simplifying assumptions about network structure and dynamics. To assess how common assumptions relate to real-world interactions, we analysed 11 networks from five settings and developed metrics, capturing crucial epidemiological features of these networks. We developed a novel metric, the ‘retention index’, to characterize the distribution of retained contacts over consecutive time steps relative to fully static and dynamic networks. In workplaces and schools, contacts in the same department formed most of the retained contacts. In contrast, no clear contact type dominated the retained contacts in hospitals, thus reducing overall risk of disease introduction would be more effective than control targeted at departments. We estimated the contacts repetition over multiple days and showed that simple resource planning models overestimate the number of unique contacts by 20%–70%. We distinguished the difference between ‘superspreader’ and infectious individuals driving ‘superspreading events’ by measuring how often the individual represents the top 80% of contacts in the time steps over the study duration. We showed an inherent difficulty in identifying ‘superspreaders’ reliably: less than 20% of the individuals in most settings were highly connected for multiple time steps.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
Keywords: | temporal network, outbreak control,superspreader, superspreading |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Biological Sciences (Leeds) > School of Biology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 24 Jan 2025 10:33 |
Last Modified: | 24 Jan 2025 10:33 |
Published Version: | https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsi... |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | The Royal Society |
Identification Number: | 10.1098/rsif.2024.0358 |
Related URLs: | |
Sustainable Development Goals: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:222259 |