Quantifying social contact patterns in Minnesota during Stay-at-Home social distancing order
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Abstract
SARS-CoV-2 is primarily transmitted through person-to-person contacts. It is important to collect information on age-specific contact patterns because SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility, transmission, and morbidity vary by age. To reduce risk of infection, social distancing measures have been implemented. Social contact data, which identify who has contact with whom especially by age and place are needed to identify high-risk groups and serve to inform the design of non-pharmaceutical interventions.
We estimated and used negative binomial regression to compare the number of daily contacts during the first wave (April-May 2020) of the Minnesota Social Contact Study, based on respondents age, gender, race/ethnicity, region, and other demographic characteristics. We used information on age and location of contacts to generate age-structured contact matrices. Finally, we compared the age-structured contact matrices during the stay-at-home order to pre-pandemic matrices.
During the state-wide stay-home order, the mean daily number of contacts was 5.6. We found significant variation in contacts by age, gender, race, and region. Adults between 40 and 50 years had the highest number of contacts. Respondents in Black households had 2.1 more contacts than respondent in White households, while respondents in Asian or Pacific Islander households had approximately the same number of contacts as respondent in White households. Respondents in Hispanic households had approximately two fewer contacts compared to White households. Most contacts were with other individuals in the same age group. Compared to the pre-pandemic period, the biggest declines occurred in contacts between children, and contacts between those over 60 with those below 60.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.07.12.21260216: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our study has some important limitations. It is difficult to obtain detailed accurate information on all interpersonal contacts for respondents with large numbers of contacts. We capped the number of contacts respondents had to recall detailed information for at 30. We did this to limit the possibility of missing information and to …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.07.12.21260216: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our study has some important limitations. It is difficult to obtain detailed accurate information on all interpersonal contacts for respondents with large numbers of contacts. We capped the number of contacts respondents had to recall detailed information for at 30. We did this to limit the possibility of missing information and to reduce the burden on the respondent. To address this limitation, we collected information on the total number of contacts in different settings and developed a strategy to impute the missing reported ages at school and work for respondents with large numbers of contacts. Another limitation might include self-selection into the sample; the respondents might be more compliant with executive orders. Nevertheless, the self-selection into the sample occurred before the start of the pandemic. There may be lack of standardization in defining “effective contacts”; we did not take into consideration masking during the first wave of data collection. We believe that our findings, despite this approach, are conservative for three reasons. First, there is some evidence that the survey may underestimate the number of household contacts; many respondents who lived with others reported having zero contacts. Social desirability bias could also be a factor due to respondents wanting to appear to comply with the SAH order. In this survey we asked people to recall their contacts, therefore respondents may forget to include some contacts. However this error is likely s...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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