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

Finally, by comparing the BBC mixing matrices to ones from POLYMOD we show that there are important differences in age-specific contributions to transmission with school-children driving transmission in POLYMOD, while in the BBC dataset adults are more responsible. The exception here is if mixing is driven by purely physical contacts when ages 5 to 9 are most responsible for transmission. These results have strong implications for control strategies (such as informing school closures) and using different underlying mixing patterns could lead to different policy recommendations. This illustrates the importance of using several sources of data for informing the age-specific mixing of the population to account for the uncertainty that stems from population mixing.