Tom Britton: Improving the use of contact studies in infectious disease modelling

Abstract

Social contact studies, investigating how many, and with whom, individuals tend to have close contact with, have been used to improve modelling of the potential for spread of infections in the community considered. The main output from such studies is an age-structured contact matrix \(M\) describing the average number of contacts between individuals of different age-groups. \(M\) often shows that social mixing is assortative with respect to age, and that younger age-groups have more contacts overall. What is lost when summarizing contact surveys with the matrix \(M\) is the heterogeneity within age-groups. In the talk I will describe how this can be taken into account, and what the consequences are on the potential for the spread of infections. (Joint work with Frank Ball).