SOCRATES: An online tool leveraging a social contact data sharing initiative to assess mitigation strategies for COVID-19

Willem, Lander; Hoang, Thang Van; Funk, Sebastian; Coletti, Pietro; Beutels, Philippe; Hens, Niel

Objective: Establishing a social contact data sharing initiative and an interactive tool to assess mitigation strategies for COVID-19. Results: We organized data sharing of published social contact surveys via online repositories and formatting guidelines. We analyzed this social contact data in terms of weighted social contact matrices, next generation matrices, relative incidence and R0. We incorporated location-specific isolation measures (e.g. school closure or telework) and capture their effect on transmission dynamics. All methods have been implemented in an online application based on R Shiny and applied to COVID-19 with age-specific susceptibility and infectiousness. Using our online tool with the available social contact data, we illustrate that social distancing could have a considerable impact on reducing transmission for COVID-19. The effect itself depends on assumptions made about disease-specific characteristics and the choice of intervention(s). Keywords: social contact data, user interface, transmission dynamics, infectious diseases, epidemics, social distancing, behavioral changes, data sharing initiative, open-source, COVID-19