Representative Contact Diaries for Modeling the Spread of Infectious Diseases in Taiwan

Fu, Yang-chih; Wang, Da-Wei; Chuang, Jen-Hsiang

Using empirical contact data to model how diseases spread has two major policy implications. First, unlike earlier studies, largescale surveys enable researchers to derive and incorporate more accurate parameters into their models [8] [9] . Earlier modeling of disease infections, for example, estimated that an average person had contact with either 10 or 20 people at work in a typical day. The estimated number of contacts at school ranged widely from 20, 79, 128 to 155 [10] [11] [12] . Whether based on simulations or small samples of interviews, such estimates may not reflect overall contact patterns in the whole population. More recent attempts, however, reveal how people actually interact under various circumstances, which helps predict possible trends of disease infections.