Contact surveys reveal heterogeneities in age-group contributions to SARS-CoV-2 dynamics in the United States
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Abstract
SARS-CoV-2 is spread primarily through person-to-person contacts. Quantifying population contact rates is important for understanding the impact of physical distancing policies and for modeling COVID-19, but contact patterns have changed substantially over time due to shifting policies and behaviors. There are surprisingly few empirical estimates of age-structured contact rates in the United States both before and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic that capture these changes. Here, we use data from six waves of the Berkeley Interpersonal Contact Survey (BICS), which collected detailed contact data between March 22, 2020 and February 15, 2021 across six metropolitan designated market areas (DMA) in the United States. Contact rates were low across all six DMAs at the start of the pandemic. We find steady increases in the mean and median number of contacts across these localities over time, as well as a greater proportion of respondents reporting a high number of contacts. We also find that young adults between ages 18 and 34 reported more contacts on average compared to other age groups. The 65 and older age group consistently reported low levels of contact throughout the study period. To understand the impact of these changing contact patterns, we simulate COVID-19 dynamics in each DMA using an age-structured mechanistic model. We compare results from models that use BICS contact rate estimates versus commonly used alternative contact rate sources. We find that simulations parameterized with BICS estimates give insight into time-varying changes in relative incidence by age group that are not captured in the absence of these frequently updated estimates. We also find that simulation results based on BICS estimates closely match observed data on the age distribution of cases, and changes in these distributions over time. Together these findings highlight the role of different age groups in driving and sustaining SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the U.S. We also show the utility of repeated contact surveys in revealing heterogeneities in the epidemiology of COVID-19 across localities in the United States.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.09.25.21264082: (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
Experimental Models: Organisms/Strains Sentences Resources We fit a logistic regression model using maximum likelihood:where µi is the probability of respondent i reporting >7 contacts, Xi is a vector of covariates, including age group, DMA, gender, race/ethnicity (Non-Hispanic White, Non-Hispanic Black/Hispanic/Non-Hispanic Other), survey wave, and whether the survey day was a weekday, and β is a vector of the estimated coefficients. Non-Hispanic Whitesuggested: NoneSoftware and Algorithms Sentences Resources For New York City and Phoenix, we also compared the simulated proportion of clinical infections in each age group to the … SciScore for 10.1101/2021.09.25.21264082: (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
Experimental Models: Organisms/Strains Sentences Resources We fit a logistic regression model using maximum likelihood:where µi is the probability of respondent i reporting >7 contacts, Xi is a vector of covariates, including age group, DMA, gender, race/ethnicity (Non-Hispanic White, Non-Hispanic Black/Hispanic/Non-Hispanic Other), survey wave, and whether the survey day was a weekday, and β is a vector of the estimated coefficients. Non-Hispanic Whitesuggested: NoneSoftware and Algorithms Sentences Resources For New York City and Phoenix, we also compared the simulated proportion of clinical infections in each age group to the empirical proportion of COVID-19 infections in each age group. Phoenixsuggested: (Phoenix, RRID:SCR_003163)Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:This analysis has several limitations to consider. First, BICS uses a quota sample from an online panel instead of a probability sample. However, respondent-level calibration weights were estimated to adjust for sample composition to produce representative surveys for each DMA. Moreover, information bias is a concern for contact surveys due to difficulties with recall and social desirability bias, which may be expected to be especially pronounced in the middle of a pandemic. Respondents may therefore have under-reported their number of contacts in the survey. At the same time, the BICS survey captures only two-way conversational and physical contacts. Other types of contacts that might be relevant to SARS-CoV-2 transmission, including, for example, contacts that happen from being in close proximity to others, were not captured in this analysis. The analyses also did not take into account the nature of these conversational and physical contacts, such as mask wearing, distance maintained during the contact, and duration of the contact. In terms of generalizability, the BICS is only offered in English, limiting the ability to generalize results to Americans whose primary language is not English. Lastly, since children, defined as less than age 18, are not included in the BICS, previously developed methods were used to fill missing data values for the youngest age group. A key limitation of the simulation results is the significant parameter uncertainty of the compartmental model...
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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