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

The copyright holder for this preprint . Analysis of the full study dataset is ongoing to ensure that information relevant for epidemiological research can be made widely available, while also protecting participant privacy and anonymity. However, the emergence of the novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 [15] has created an urgent need for the best possible social mixing data to be made available to support the outbreak response, as well as for the possibility to use multiple sources of social mixing data to evaluate the uncertainty that stems from social mixing in evaluating public health interventions. It is therefore our hope that this detailed contemporary picture of age-specific mixing patterns will be of value to those modelling COVID-19 to improve the evidence base for decisions on potential control measures in the UK, as well as suggesting broader insights into social mixing that may be relevant to other countries as well.