Improving the use of social contact studies in epidemic modelling

Social contact studies, investigating social contact patterns in a population sample, have been an important contribution for epidemic models to better fit real life epidemics. A contact matrix $M$, having the \emph{mean} number of contacts between individuals of different age groups as its elements, is estimated and used in combination with a multitype epidemic model to produce better data fitting and also giving more appropriate expressions for $R_0$ and other model outcomes. However, $M$ does not capture \emph{variation} in contacts \emph{within} each age group, which is often large in empirical settings. Here such variation within age groups is included in a simple way by dividing each age group into two halves: the socially active and the socially less active. The extended contact matrix, and its associated epidemic model, empirically show that acknowledging variation in social activity within age groups has a substantial impact on modelling outcomes such as $R_0$ and the final fraction $\tau$ getting infected. In fact, the variation in social activity within age groups is often more important for data fitting than the division into different age groups itself. However, a difficulty with heterogeneity in social activity is that social contact studies typically lack information on if mixing with respect to social activity is assortative or not, i.e.\ do socially active tend to mix more with other socially active or more with socially less active? The analyses show that accounting for heterogeneity in social activity improves the analyses irrespective of if such mixing is assortative or not, but the different assumptions gives rather different output. Future social contact studies should hence also try to infer the degree of assortativity of contacts with respect to social activity.
Comment: Supplementary material not included. Contact Tom Britton if you are interested