Inference and control of the nosocomial transmission of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Pei, Sen; Morone, Flaviano; Liljeros, Fredrik; Makse, Hernán; Shaman, Jeffrey L

In hospital settings, MRSA transmission between colonized/infected patients and susceptible individuals is primarily mediated indirectly by healthcare workers (Lowy, 1998; Temime et al., 2009) . As a result, accurate representation of actual contact patterns is crucial for modeling MRSA transmission. Many previous studies have formulated transmission models using ordinary differential equations (ODEs) (Cooper et al., 2004a; Kajita et al., 2007; D'Agata et al., 2009) or stochastic processes (Forrester et al., 2007; Kypraios et al., 2010) . To account for heterogeneity among different settings, several studies have included multiple facilities in a single-model construct, incorporating prior information on facility type in order to characterize and differentiate transmission dynamics (Bootsma et al., 2006; Forrester et al., 2007) . These approaches were then generalized to permit connection among institutions at different scales (hospitals, nursing homes and long-term healthcare facilities, or multiple wards or units within a facility) with time-varying contact patterns (Thomas et al., 2018) .