Estimating household contact matrices structure from easily collectable metadata.

Contact matrices are a commonly adopted data representation, used to develop compartmental models for epidemic spreading, accounting for the contact heterogeneities across age groups. Their estimation, however, is generally time and effort consuming and model-driven strategies to quantify the contacts are often needed. In this article we focus on household contact matrices, describing the contacts among the members of a family and develop a parametric model to describe them. This model combines demographic and easily quantifiable survey-based data and is tested on high resolution proximity data collected in two sites in South Africa. Given its simplicity and interpretability, we expect our method to be easily applied to other contexts as well and we identify relevant questions that need to be addressed during the data collection procedure.

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Copyright: © 2024 Dall’Amico et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

CCo has received grant support from Sanofi Pasteur, US CDC, Welcome Trust, Programme for Applied Technologies in Health (PATH), Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and South African Medical Research Council (SA-MRC). NW reports receiving grants from Sanofi Pasteur, US CDC and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. All other authors do not report any competing interests.