Abstract
The social contact patterns associated with the infectious disease transmitted by airborne droplets or close contact follow specific rules. Understanding these processes can improve the accuracy of disease transmission models, permitting their integration into model simulations. In this study, we performed a large-scale population-based survey to collect social contact patterns in three cities on the Pearl River Delta of China in winter and summer. A total of 5,818 participants were face-to-face interviewed and 35,542 contacts were recorded. The average number of contacts per person each day was 16.7 considering supplementary professional contacts (SPCs). Contacts that occurred on a daily basis, lasted more than 4 hours, and took place in households were more likely to involve physical contact. The seasonal characteristics of social contact were heterogeneous, such that contact in the winter was more likely to involve physical contact compared to summer months. The spatial characteristics of the contacts were similar. Social mixing patterns differed according to age, but all ages maintained regular contact with their peers. Taken together, these findings describe the spatiotemporal distribution of social contact patterns relevant to infections in the Guangdong Province of China. This information provides important parameters for mathematical models of infectious diseases.
Highlights
Many of the infectious diseases transmitted by airborne droplets or close contact are spread from person to person
The Guangdong Province is in South China and had a well-developed economy and trade, a high population density and high intensity connections across the globe, with a far-reaching impact on global pandemics of respiratory infectious diseases
A Generalized Additive Model (GAM) with a negative binomial distribution was used to analyze the association between the number of contacts, including supplementary professional contacts (SPCs) with the selected variables, which compares the influence of the variables on the number of contacts including SPCs
Summary
All family members aged >6 months of each selected household were enrolled for survey assessments and each district had a sample size of ~1,000. A Generalized Additive Model (GAM) with a negative binomial distribution was used to analyze the association between the number of contacts, including SPCs with the selected variables (age, sex, season survey, household size and occupation), which compares the influence of the variables on the number of contacts including SPCs. Chi-squared tests were used to compare the distribution of contacted individuals by contact features (relationship, location, frequency, duration of contacts) between summer and winter months and amongst the three cities. Sampling weights for each age group were calculated based on official census data of the year 2015 (see Table S1), and used to correctly estimate the mean number of contacts. All figures were plotted using R package ggplot[2]
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