Social contact patterns and implications for infectious disease transmission: a systematic review and meta-analysis of contact surveys
- Imperial College London, United Kingdom
- Indiana University School of Public Health, United States
- VITROME, Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement, Senegal
- University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
- Vanderbilt University Medical Center, United States
- KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Kenya
- All India Institute of Medical Sciences, India
- Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, United States
- Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
- Instituto de Investigación Nutricional, Peru
- London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom
- The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
- Chulabhorn Royal Academy, Thailand
- Bocconi University, Italy
- University of Cape Town, South Africa
- Health Directorate, Luxembourg
- Murdoch Children's Research Institute, Australia
- Mahidol University, Thailand
- National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, United States
- US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, India
- United States Department of Veterans Affairs, United States
- The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
- Fudan University, China
Abstract
Background: Transmission of respiratory pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 depends on patterns of contact and mixing across populations. Understanding this is crucial to predict pathogen spread and the effectiveness of control efforts. Most analyses of contact patterns to date have focussed on high-income settings.
Methods: Here, we conduct a systematic review and individual-participant meta-analysis of surveys carried out in low- and middle-income countries and compare patterns of contact in these settings to surveys previously carried out in high-income countries. Using individual-level data from 28,503 participants and 413,069 contacts across 27 surveys we explored how contact characteristics (number, location, duration and whether physical) vary across income settings.
Results: Contact rates declined with age in high- and upper-middle-income settings, but not in low-income settings, where adults aged 65+ made similar numbers of contacts as younger individuals and mixed with all age-groups. Across all settings, increasing household size was a key determinant of contact frequency and characteristics, with low-income settings characterised by the largest, most intergenerational households. A higher proportion of contacts were made at home in low-income settings, and work/school contacts were more frequent in high-income strata. We also observed contrasting effects of gender across income-strata on the frequency, duration and type of contacts individuals made.
Conclusions: These differences in contact patterns between settings have material consequences for both spread of respiratory pathogens, as well as the effectiveness of different non-pharmaceutical interventions.
Funding: This work is primarily being funded by joint Centre funding from the UK Medical Research Council and DFID (MR/R015600/1).
Data availability
All individual-level data across all studies and analysis code are available at https://github.com/mrc-ide/contact_patterns (see Supplementary Text 4 for data dictionary).
-
Social mixing patterns in rural and urban areas of southern ChinaProceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2014.0268.
-
Social contact data for China mainlandZenodo, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3516113.
-
POLYMOD social contact dataZenodo, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.1059920.
-
Social contacts and the locations in which they occur as risk factors for influenza infectionProceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2014.0709.
-
Temporal variation of human encounters and the number of locations in which they occur: a longitudinal study of Hong Kong residentsJournal of the Royal Society Interface, doi: 10.1098/rsif.2017.0838.
-
Social contact data for Hong KongZenodo, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.1165562.
-
Quantifying Age-Related Rates of Social Contact Using Diaries in a Rural Coastal Population of KenyaPlos One, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0104786.s007.
-
Social contact data for PeruZenodo, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3874805.
-
Social contact data for RussiaZenodo, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3874653.
-
Social contact data for ThailandZenodo, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.4086739.
-
Comparison of Contact Patterns Relevant for Transmission of Respiratory Pathogens in Thailand and the Netherlands Using Respondent-Driven SamplingPlos One, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0113711.s010.
-
Social contact data for VietnamZenodo, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.1289474.
-
Social contact data for Zambia and South Africa (CODA dataset)Zenodo, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3874675.
-
Social contact data for ZimbabweZenodo, doi: 10.5281/zenodo.3886638.
Article and author information
Author details
Oliver John Watson
Funding
joint Centre funding from the UK Medical Research Council and DFID (MR/R015600/1)
- Andria Mousa
- Peter Winskill
- Patrick Walker
- Charles Whittaker
Australian National Health and Medical Research Council
- Fiona M Russell
WHO
- Fiona M Russell
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- Fiona M Russell
Wellcome Trust
- Fiona M Russell
DFAT
- Fiona M Russell
EPSRC through the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Modern Statistics and Statistical Machine Learning
- Mélodie Monod
University of Washington
- Jonathan D Sugimoto
US National Institutes of Health, NIAID
- Jonathan D Sugimoto
NIH (K24AI148459)
- Carlos G Grijalva
General Medical Sciences / National Institute of Health (U01-GM070749)
- Gail E Potter
UK foreign Commonwealth and Development Office
- Oliver John Watson
Emmes Company
- Gail E Potter
CUHK Direct grant for research (2019.020)
- Kin O Kwok
Health and Medical Research Fund (INF-CUHK-1,17160302,18170312)
- Kin O Kwok
General Research Fund (14112818)
- Kin O Kwok
Early Career Scheme (24104920)
- Kin O Kwok
Wellcome Trust (200861/Z/16/Z)
- Kin O Kwok
UK Medical Research Council. UK-funded award is part of the EDCTP2 programme supported by the EU (MR/P022081/1)
- Peter J Dodd
Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship
- Eleanor FG Neal
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All original studies included were approved by an institutional ethics review committee. Ethics approval was not required for the present study.
Reviewing Editor
- Isabel Rodriguez-Barraquer, University of California, San Francisco, United States
Publication history
- Received: May 12, 2021
- Accepted: November 24, 2021
- Accepted Manuscript published: November 25, 2021 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: January 18, 2022 (version 2)
Copyright
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
Metrics
-
- 1,574
- Page views
-
- 245
- Downloads
-
- 14
- Citations
Article citation count generated by polling the highest count across the following sources: PubMed Central, Crossref, Scopus.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Social contact patterns and implications for infectious disease transmission: a systematic review and meta-analysis of contact surveys
eLife 10:e70294.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.70294
Further reading
-
- Epidemiology and Global Health
- Genetics and Genomics
Background: To evaluate the utility of polygenic risk scores (PRS) in identifying high-risk individuals, different publicly available PRS for breast (n=85), prostate (n=37), colorectal (n=22) and lung cancers (n=11) were examined in a prospective study of 21,694 Chinese adults.
Methods: We constructed PRS using weights curated in the online PGS Catalog. PRS performance was evaluated by distribution, discrimination, predictive ability, and calibration. Hazard ratios (HR) and corresponding confidence intervals [CI] of the common cancers after 20 years of follow-up were estimated using Cox proportional hazard models for different levels of PRS.
Results: A total of 495 breast, 308 prostate, 332 female-colorectal, 409 male-colorectal, 181 female-lung and 381 male-lung incident cancers were identified. The area under receiver operating characteristic curve for the best performing site-specific PRS were 0.61 (PGS000873, breast), 0.70 (PGS00662, prostate), 0.65 (PGS000055, female-colorectal), 0.60 (PGS000734, male-colorectal) and 0.56 (PGS000721, female-lung), and 0.58 (PGS000070, male-lung), respectively. Compared to the middle quintile, individuals in the highest cancer-specific PRS quintile were 64% more likely to develop cancers of the breast, prostate, and colorectal. For lung cancer, the lowest cancer-specific PRS quintile was associated with 28-34% decreased risk compared to the middle quintile. In contrast, the hazard ratios observed for quintiles 4 (female-lung: 0.95 [0.61-1.47]; male-lung: 1.14 [0.82-1.57]) and 5 (female-lung: 0.95 [0.61-1.47]) were not significantly different from that for the middle quintile.
Conclusions: Site-specific PRSs can stratify the risk of developing breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers in this East Asian population. Appropriate correction factors may be required to improve calibration.
Funding This work is supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore (NRF-NRFF2017-02), PRECISION Health Research, Singapore (PRECISE) and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). WP Koh was supported by National Medical Research Council, Singapore (NMRC/CSA/0055/2013). CC Khor was supported by National Research Foundation Singapore (NRF-NRFI2018-01). Rajkumar Dorajoo received a grant from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research Career Development Award (A*STAR CDA - 202D8090), and from Ministry of Health Healthy Longevity Catalyst Award (HLCA20Jan-0022). The Singapore Chinese Health Study was supported by grants from the National Medical Research Council, Singapore (NMRC/CIRG/1456/2016) and the U.S. National Institutes of Health [NIH] (R01 CA144034 and UM1 CA182876).
-
- Epidemiology and Global Health
- Immunology and Inflammation
COVID-19, with persistent and new onset of symptoms such as fatigue, post-exertional malaise, and cognitive dysfunction that last for months and impact everyday functioning, is referred to as Long COVID under the general category of post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC). PASC is highly heterogenous and may be associated with multisystem tissue damage/dysfunction including acute encephalitis, cardiopulmonary syndromes, fibrosis, hepatobiliary damages, gastrointestinal dysregulation, myocardial infarction, neuromuscular syndromes, neuropsychiatric disorders, pulmonary damage, renal failure, stroke, and vascular endothelial dysregulation. A better understanding of the pathophysiologic mechanisms underlying PASC is essential to guide prevention and treatment. This review addresses potential mechanisms and hypotheses that connect SARS-CoV-2 infection to long-term health consequences. Comparisons between PASC and other virus-initiated chronic syndromes such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome will be addressed. Aligning symptoms with other chronic syndromes and identifying potentially regulated common underlining pathways may be necessary for understanding the true nature of PASC. The discussed contributors to PASC symptoms include sequelae from acute SARS-CoV-2 injury to one or more organs, persistent reservoirs of the replicating virus or its remnants in several tissues, re-activation of latent pathogens such as Epstein–Barr and herpes viruses in COVID-19 immune-dysregulated tissue environment, SARS-CoV-2 interactions with host microbiome/virome communities, clotting/coagulation dysregulation, dysfunctional brainstem/vagus nerve signaling, dysautonomia or autonomic dysfunction, ongoing activity of primed immune cells, and autoimmunity due to molecular mimicry between pathogen and host proteins. The individualized nature of PASC symptoms suggests that different therapeutic approaches may be required to best manage specific patients.
