Contact network

The network between people where the edges are physical contacts or proximity that can facilitate Airborne disease transmission. Because of its nature, it is dynamic. It is different from the social network because we “contact” many people we don’t know every day, on the subway, bus, grocery stores, etc.

At the same time, it is also heavily influenced by social networks. Sekara2016fundamental reveals that the “gatherings” constitute a large part of the contact network. Datasets like the ones from the SocioPatterns project also aims to collect high-resolution (both in a temporal and spatial sense) contact network using various devices.

Another approach has been using mobile-phone tracking data (e.g., foot-traffic data). The resolution would be lower (~at the level of a “place”) but larger-scale data is available (e.g., SafeGraph). Papers such as Chang2020mobility used this coarse-grained, POI-CBG-level data to create an effective epidemic model.

Data from Contact tracing can provide glimpses of this contact network.

The Network epidemiology simulations would require certain assumptions (we often don’t have the right data). Contreras2022impact studies the impact of those assumptions.