Face-to-face social contacts are potentially important transmission routes
for acute respiratory infections, and understanding the contact network can
improve our ability to predict, contain, and control epidemics. Although
workplaces are important settings for infectious disease transmission, few
studies have collected workplace contact data and estimated workplace contact
networks. We use contact diaries, architectural distance measures, and
institutional structures to estimate social contact networks within a Swiss
research institute. Some contact reports were inconsistent, indicating
reporting errors. We adjust for this with a latent variable model, jointly
estimating the true (unobserved) network of contacts and duration-specific
reporting probabilities. We find that contact probability decreases with
distance, and research group membership, role, and shared projects are strongly
predictive of contact patterns. Estimated reporting probabilities were low only
for 0-5 minute contacts. Adjusting for reporting error changed the estimate of
the duration distribution, but did not change the estimates of covariate
effects and had little effect on epidemic predictions. Our epidemic simulation
study indicates that inclusion of network structure based on architectural and
organizational structure data can improve the accuracy of epidemic forecasting
models.Comment: 36 pages, 4 figure
