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

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

Social contact surveys have proven to be an invaluable source of information about how people mix in the population [3] [4] [5] . They have been shown to explain close contact infectious disease data well [6] [7] [8] . During the A(H1N1)v2009 pandemic, contact survey data were used to reproduce the observed incidence patterns of the emerging outbreak [9] . Hens et al. [10] used social contact data collected in the POLYMOD project [4] to quantify the impact of school closure on the spread of airborne infections. This was done by comparing the basic reproduction number, or the average number of secondary infections caused by a single infectious individual in a completely susceptible population, derived using mixing patterns observed on weekends or during a holiday period with those derived using mixing patterns observed on weekdays. By considering mixing patterns at different locations including or excluding the contribution of some of these locations, social distancing measures can be mimicked and their impact on disease spread can be investigated to potentially guide policy makers.