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 . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02. 16.20023754 doi: medRxiv preprint 50.2% didn't involve touch, and the rest were unspecified, resulting in comparable levels of reported conversational and physical contacts. In the BBC dataset, participants reported about three times more conversational contacts than physical (75.6% of reported contacts were conversational and 24.4% were physical). Compared to the general population, POLYMOD oversampled younger groups by design (i.e. ages under 20) and the BBC data ended up oversampling adults (in particular ages 25-49); both studies undersample ages over 65 (Fig 6A) . The distribution of the number of contacts reported across all participants followed a negative-binomial distribution with mean 10.47 for BBC data and 11.81 for POLYMOD data (Fig 6C and D, respectively) . The POLYMOD data was right censored at 29 contacts, which is evident in the density plot ( Fig 6D) .