Mobility traces and spreading of COVID-19

Sebastian Alexander Muller; Michael Balmer; Andreas Neumann; Kai Nagel

Public transport, however, is much different: One sits or stands next to other persons every day. In consequence, possible infection paths are between different persons every day. Since they run back into their respective homes, public transport results in strong mixing. Other activities are probably in between: children at day car or primary school are probably strongly connected within relatively small groups, i.e. similar to the infection dynamics at homes, while young adults at secondary or tertiary education are probably much less strongly connected, but have many possible interactions with other people, varying from one day to the next. For work it presumably depends on the work environment: workers in a small company meet the same people every day while workers in a large company may meet different people every day. People with customer-facing jobs, such as sales people, are again different.