191 research outputs found
Quantifying social contacts in a household setting of rural Kenya using wearable proximity sensors
International audienc
Study design and protocol for investigating social network patterns in rural and urban schools and households in a coastal setting in Kenya using wearable proximity sensors
Background: Social contact patterns shape the transmission of respiratory infections spread via close interactions. There is a paucity of observational data from schools and households, particularly in developing countries. Portable wireless sensors can record unbiased proximity events between individuals facing each other, shedding light on pathways of infection transmission. Design and methods: The aim is to characterize face-to-face contact patterns that may shape the transmission of respiratory infections in schools and households in Kilifi, Kenya. Two schools, one each from a rural and urban area, will be purposively selected. From each school, 350 students will be randomly selected proportional to class size and gender to participate. Nine index students from each school will be randomly selected and followed-up to their households. All index household residents will be recruited into the study. A further 3-5 neighbouring households will also be recruited to give a maximum of 350 participants per household setting. The sample size per site is limited by the number of sensors available for data collection. Each participant will wear a wireless proximity sensor lying on their chest area for 7 consecutive days. Data on proximal dyadic interactions will be collected automatically by the sensors only for participants who are face-to-face. Key characteristics of interest include the distribution of degree and the frequency and duration of contacts and their variation in rural and urban areas. These will be stratified by age, gender, role, and day of the week. Expected results: Resultant data will inform on social contact patterns in rural and urban areas of a previously unstudied population. Ensuing data will be used to parameterize mathematical simulation models of transmission of a range of respiratory viruses, including respiratory syncytial virus, and used to explore the impact of intervention measures such as vaccination and social distancing
Estimating household contact matrices structure from easily collectable metadata
Contact matrices are a commonly adopted data representation, used to develop
compartmental models for epidemic spreading, accounting for the contact
heterogeneities across age groups. Their estimation, however, is generally time
and effort consuming and model-driven strategies to quantify the contacts are
often needed. In this article we focus on household contact matrices,
describing the contacts among the members of a family and develop a parametric
model to describe them. This model combines demographic and easily quantifiable
survey-based data and is tested on high resolution proximity data collected in
two sites in South Africa. Given its simplicity and interpretability, we expect
our method to be easily applied to other contexts as well and we identify
relevant questions that need to be addressed during the data collection
procedure
Wearable proximity sensors for monitoring a mass casualty incident exercise: a feasibility study
Over the past several decades, naturally occurring and man-made mass casualty
incidents (MCI) have increased in frequency and number, worldwide. To test the
impact of such event on medical resources, simulations can provide a safe,
controlled setting while replicating the chaotic environment typical of an
actual disaster. A standardised method to collect and analyse data from mass
casualty exercises is needed, in order to assess preparedness and performance
of the healthcare staff involved. We report on the use of wearable proximity
sensors to measure proximity events during a MCI simulation. We investigated
the interactions between medical staff and patients, to evaluate the time
dedicated by the medical staff with respect to the severity of the injury of
the victims depending on the roles. We estimated the presence of the patients
in the different spaces of the field hospital, in order to study the patients'
flow. Data were obtained and collected through the deployment of wearable
proximity sensors during a mass casualty incident functional exercise. The
scenario included two areas: the accident site and the Advanced Medical Post
(AMP), and the exercise lasted 3 hours. A total of 238 participants simulating
medical staff and victims were involved. Each participant wore a proximity
sensor and 30 fixed devices were placed in the field hospital. The contact
networks show a heterogeneous distribution of the cumulative time spent in
proximity by participants. We obtained contact matrices based on cumulative
time spent in proximity between victims and the rescuers. Our results showed
that the time spent in proximity by the healthcare teams with the victims is
related to the severity of the patient's injury. The analysis of patients' flow
showed that the presence of patients in the rooms of the hospital is consistent
with triage code and diagnosis, and no obvious bottlenecks were found
Model evaluation of target product profiles of an infant vaccine against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in a developed country setting
Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is a major cause of lower respiratory tract disease in children worldwide and is a significant cause of hospital admissions in young children in England. No RSV vaccine has been licensed but a number are under development. In this work, we present two structurally distinct mathematical models, parameterized using RSV data from the UK, which have been used to explore the effect of introducing an RSV paediatric vaccine to the National programme. We have explored different vaccine properties, and dosing regimens combined with a range of implementation strategies for RSV control. The results suggest that vaccine properties that confer indirect protection have the greatest effect in reducing the burden of disease in children under 5 years. The findings are reinforced by the concurrence of predictions from the two models with very different epidemiological structure. The approach described has general application in evaluating vaccine target product profiles
A Systematic Review of Social Contact Surveys to Inform Transmission Models of Close-contact Infections.
BACKGROUND: Researchers increasingly use social contact data to inform models for infectious disease spread with the aim of guiding effective policies about disease prevention and control. In this article, we undertake a systematic review of the study design, statistical analyses, and outcomes of the many social contact surveys that have been published. METHODS: We systematically searched PubMed and Web of Science for articles regarding social contact surveys. We followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines as closely as possible. RESULTS: In total, we identified 64 social contact surveys, with more than 80% of the surveys conducted in high-income countries. Study settings included general population (58%), schools or universities (37%), and health care/conference/research institutes (5%). The largest number of studies did not focus on a specific age group (38%), whereas others focused on adults (32%) or children (19%). Retrospective (45%) and prospective (41%) designs were used most often with 6% using both for comparison purposes. The definition of a contact varied among surveys, e.g., a nonphysical contact may require conversation, close proximity, or both. We identified age, time schedule (e.g., weekday/weekend), and household size as relevant determinants of contact patterns across a large number of studies. CONCLUSIONS: We found that the overall features of the contact patterns were remarkably robust across several countries, and irrespective of the study details. By considering the most common approach in each aspect of design (e.g., sampling schemes, data collection, definition of contact), we could identify recommendations for future contact data surveys that may be used to facilitate comparison between studies
Inferring high-resolution human mixing patterns for disease modeling
Mathematical and computational modeling approaches are increasingly used as
quantitative tools in the analysis and forecasting of infectious disease
epidemics. The growing need for realism in addressing complex public health
questions is however calling for accurate models of the human contact patterns
that govern the disease transmission processes. Here we present a data-driven
approach to generate effective descriptions of population-level contact
patterns by using highly detailed macro (census) and micro (survey) data on key
socio-demographic features. We produce age-stratified contact matrices for 277
sub-national administrative regions of countries covering approximately 3.5
billion people and reflecting the high degree of cultural and societal
diversity of the focus countries. We use the derived contact matrices to model
the spread of airborne infectious diseases and show that sub-national
heterogeneities in human mixing patterns have a marked impact on epidemic
indicators such as the reproduction number and overall attack rate of epidemics
of the same etiology. The contact patterns derived here are made publicly
available as a modeling tool to study the impact of socio-economic differences
and demographic heterogeneities across populations on the epidemiology of
infectious diseases.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure
Projecting contact matrices in 177 geographical regions: An update and comparison with empirical data for the COVID-19 era.
Mathematical models have played a key role in understanding the spread of directly-transmissible infectious diseases such as Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), as well as the effectiveness of public health responses. As the risk of contracting directly-transmitted infections depends on who interacts with whom, mathematical models often use contact matrices to characterise the spread of infectious pathogens. These contact matrices are usually generated from diary-based contact surveys. However, the majority of places in the world do not have representative empirical contact studies, so synthetic contact matrices have been constructed using more widely available setting-specific survey data on household, school, classroom, and workplace composition combined with empirical data on contact patterns in Europe. In 2017, the largest set of synthetic contact matrices to date were published for 152 geographical locations. In this study, we update these matrices with the most recent data and extend our analysis to 177 geographical locations. Due to the observed geographic differences within countries, we also quantify contact patterns in rural and urban settings where data is available. Further, we compare both the 2017 and 2020 synthetic matrices to out-of-sample empirically-constructed contact matrices, and explore the effects of using both the empirical and synthetic contact matrices when modelling physical distancing interventions for the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that the synthetic contact matrices show qualitative similarities to the contact patterns in the empirically-constructed contact matrices. Models parameterised with the empirical and synthetic matrices generated similar findings with few differences observed in age groups where the empirical matrices have missing or aggregated age groups. This finding means that synthetic contact matrices may be used in modelling outbreaks in settings for which empirical studies have yet to be conducted
Characterising social contacts under COVID-19 control measures in Africa.
BACKGROUND: Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, countries adopted non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as lockdowns to limit SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Social contact studies help measure the effectiveness of NPIs and estimate parameters for modelling SARS-CoV-2 transmission. However, few contact studies have been conducted in Africa. METHODS: We analysed nationally representative cross-sectional survey data from 19 African Union Member States, collected by the Partnership for Evidence-based Responses to COVID-19 (PERC) via telephone interviews at two time points (August 2020 and February 2021). Adult respondents reported contacts made in the previous day by age group, demographic characteristics, and their attitudes towards COVID-19. We described mean and median contacts across these characteristics and related contacts to Google Mobility reports and the Oxford Government Response Stringency Index for each country at the two time points. RESULTS: Mean reported contacts varied across countries with the lowest reported in Ethiopia (9, SD=16, median = 4, IQR = 8) in August 2020 and the highest in Sudan (50, SD=53, median = 33, IQR = 40) in February 2021. Contacts of people aged 18-55 represented 50% of total contacts, with most contacts in household and work or study settings for both surveys. Mean contacts increased for Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Sudan, and Uganda and decreased for Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Tunisia between the two time points. Men had more contacts than women and contacts were consistent across urban or rural settings (except in Cameroon and Kenya, where urban respondents had more contacts than rural ones, and in Senegal and Zambia, where the opposite was the case). There were no strong and consistent variations in the number of mean or median contacts by education level, self-reported health, perceived self-reported risk of infection, vaccine acceptance, mask ownership, and perceived risk of COVID-19 to health. Mean contacts were correlated with Google mobility (coefficient 0.57, p=0.051 and coefficient 0.28, p=0.291 in August 2020 and February 2021, respectively) and Stringency Index (coefficient -0.12, p = 0.304 and coefficient -0.33, p=0.005 in August 2020 and February 2021, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: These are the first COVID-19 social contact data collected for 16 of the 19 countries surveyed. We find a high reported number of daily contacts in all countries and substantial variations in mean contacts across countries and by gender. Increased stringency and decreased mobility were associated with a reduction in the number of contacts. These data may be useful to understand transmission patterns, model infection transmission, and for pandemic planning
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