Abstract
Policy makers have implemented multiple non-pharmaceutical strategies to mitigate the COVID-19 worldwide crisis. Interventions had the aim of reducing close proximity interactions, which drive the spread of the disease. A deeper knowledge of human physical interactions has revealed necessary, especially in all settings involving children, whose education and gathering activities should be preserved. Despite their relevance, almost no data are available on close proximity contacts among children in schools or other educational settings during the pandemic.Contact data are usually gathered via Bluetooth, which nonetheless offers a low temporal and spatial resolution. Recently, ultra-wideband (UWB) radios emerged as a more accurate alternative that nonetheless exhibits a significantly higher energy consumption, limiting in-field studies. In this paper, we leverage a novel approach, embodied by the Janus system that combines these radios by exploiting their complementary benefits. The very accurate proximity data gathered in-field by Janus, once augmented with several metadata, unlocks unprecedented levels of information, enabling the development of novel multi-level risk analyses.By means of this technology, we have collected real contact data of children and educators in three summer camps during summer 2020 in the province of Trento, Italy. The wide variety of performed daily activities induced multiple individual behaviors, allowing a rich investigation of social environments from the contagion risk perspective. We consider risk based on duration and proximity of contacts and classify interactions according to different risk levels. We can then evaluate the summer camps’ organization, observe the effect of partition in small groups, or social bubbles, and identify the organized activities that mitigate the riskier behaviors.Overall, we offer an insight into the educator-child and child-child social interactions during the pandemic, thus providing a valuable tool for schools, summer camps, and policy makers to (re)structure educational activities safely.
Highlights
Close proximity interactions (CPIs) drive the spread of any disease that is transmitted predominantly by respiratory droplets and saliva, such as influenza, common colds, and severe acute respiratory syndromes (i.e., Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)) [1,2,3,4,5,6]
We offer an insight into the educator-child and child-child social interactions during the pandemic, providing a valuable tool for schools, summer camps, and policy makers tostructure educational activities safely
Several local and national governments have launched smartphone digital contact tracing (DCT) apps based on the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology [26] and the GAEN (Google and Apple Exposure Notification) interface [27], and several studies have shown the effectiveness of Bluetooth-based DCT using real-world contact patterns [28, 29] and in pilot and country-wide studies conducted in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Spain (Gomera island) [30,31,32,33]
Summary
Close proximity interactions (CPIs) drive the spread of any disease that is transmitted predominantly by respiratory droplets and saliva, such as influenza, common colds, and severe acute respiratory syndromes (i.e., Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)) [1,2,3,4,5,6]. An improved characterization of CPIs should lead to a better understanding of the spread dynamics and possibly inform public health experts and policy makers to design more effective interventions [7] For this reason, some research efforts have used wearable devices and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or infrared (IR) sensors to measure and analyze high-resolution proximity interactions in different settings such as schools [4, 8], workplaces [9, 10], hospitals [11,12,13,14,15], households [16], and conferences [9, 17, 18]. Several local and national governments have launched smartphone digital contact tracing (DCT) apps based on the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology [26] and the GAEN (Google and Apple Exposure Notification) interface [27], and several studies have shown the effectiveness of Bluetooth-based DCT using real-world contact patterns [28, 29] and in pilot and country-wide studies conducted in Switzerland, the United Kingdom (the Isle of Wight and the whole country), and Spain (Gomera island) [30,31,32,33]
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