AI Article Synopsis
- The 2010-2011 social contact survey in Flanders, Belgium aimed to analyze social mixing patterns across all age groups, enabling a comparison to an earlier survey from 2006.
- Various data mining techniques and generalized additive models were employed to assess contact rates and mixing patterns, revealing strong age and sex homophily in social interactions.
- The results indicated significant reductions in epidemic spread depending on the day of the week and holiday periods, with minimal changes in contact patterns observed over the five years between the two surveys.
Article Abstract
Background: In 2010-2011, we conducted a social contact survey in Flanders, Belgium, aimed at improving and extending the design of the first social contact survey conducted in Belgium in 2006. This second social contact survey aimed to enable, for the first time, the estimation of social mixing patterns for an age range of 0 to 99 years and the investigation of whether contact rates remain stable over this 5-year time period.
Methods: Different data mining techniques are used to explore the data, and the age-specific number of social contacts and the age-specific contact rates are modelled using a generalized additive models for location, scale and shape (GAMLSS) model. We compare different matrices using assortativeness measures. The relative change in the basic reproduction number (R) and the ratio of relative incidences with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals (BCI) are employed to investigate and quantify the impact on epidemic spread due to differences in sex, day of the week, holiday vs. regular periods and changes in mixing patterns over the 5-year time gap between the 2006 and 2010-2011 surveys. Finally, we compare the fit of the contact matrices in 2006 and 2010-2011 to Varicella serological data.
Results: All estimated contact patterns featured strong homophily in age and sex, especially for small children and adolescents. A 30% (95% BCI [17%; 37%]) and 29% (95% BCI [14%; 40%]) reduction in R was observed for weekend versus weekdays and for holiday versus regular periods, respectively. Significantly more interactions between people aged 60+ years and their grandchildren were observed on holiday and weekend days than on regular weekdays. Comparing contact patterns using different methods did not show any substantial differences over the 5-year time period under study.
Conclusions: The second social contact survey in Flanders, Belgium, endorses the findings of its 2006 predecessor and adds important information on the social mixing patterns of people older than 60 years of age. Based on this analysis, the mixing patterns of people older than 60 years exhibit considerable heterogeneity, and overall, the comparison of the two surveys shows that social contact rates can be assumed stable in Flanders over a time span of 5 years.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7971398 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12879-021-05949-4 | DOI Listing |
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