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

We estimate the effect of school closure and telework on disease transmission dynamics. In order to do this, we use 3 age classes: 0-18 years, 19-60 years and over 60 years of age. For each country, we calculate contact rates between each age group after excluding data from holiday periods. We exclude compensation behavior if people do not go to work or school, to simulate quarantine-like scenarios. We fixed the reference proportion of telework at 5%, in line with European observations [Eurostat, 2020; https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/]. We analyse the change in transmission dynamics with 20%, 35% and 50% telework with and without school closure, based on earlier survey-based responses on the possibilities of employees to conduct their work activities remotely as teleworker [16] .