Contacts in context: large-scale setting-specific social mixing matrices from the BBC Pandemic project

Petra Klepac; Adam J Kucharski; Andrew JK Conlan; Stephen Kissler; Maria Tang; Hannah Fry; Julia R Gog

A landmark dataset of self-reported contacts was the POLYMOD study [22] , which collected social mixing data for 7,290 participants across eight European countries. These data have been 1 widely used to understand the epidemiology of infectious diseases [25] and inform policy-relevant disease modelling [23, 2] . However, the sample size for each country (e.g. 1,012 participants for Great Britain) limit the ability to stratify by multiple demographic factors and still obtain precise estimates of social mixing within those groups, and does not have details about the location of participants, which meant social contacts could not be compared between spatial covariates such as urban and rural setting. Moreover, the POLYMOD study was conducted in 2005-6, and so patterns may have changed since then.