Inferring age-specific differences in susceptibility to and infectiousness upon SARS-CoV-2 infection based on Belgian social contact data
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Abstract
Several important aspects related to SARS-CoV-2 transmission are not well known due to a lack of appropriate data. However, mathematical and computational tools can be used to extract part of this information from the available data, like some hidden age-related characteristics. In this paper, we present a method to investigate age-specific differences in transmission parameters related to susceptibility to and infectiousness upon contracting SARS-CoV-2 infection. More specifically, we use panel-based social contact data from diary-based surveys conducted in Belgium combined with the next generation principle to infer the relative incidence and we compare this to real-life incidence data. Comparing these two allows for the estimation of age-specific transmission parameters. Our analysis implies the susceptibility in children to be around half of the susceptibility in adults, and even lower for very young children (preschooler). However, the probability of adults and the elderly to contract the infection is decreasing throughout the vaccination campaign, thereby modifying the picture over time.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.10.21264753: (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: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:However, our method suffers from several limitations. A potential bias which needs to be acknowledged is the use of PCR data which correspond to the observed relative incidence and do not necessarily correspond to the true relative incidence as each age class is not necessarily tested in the same way, even if we discard periods of strong variation in testing policy. Indeed, even in the absence of a change in testing policy, …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.10.10.21264753: (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: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:However, our method suffers from several limitations. A potential bias which needs to be acknowledged is the use of PCR data which correspond to the observed relative incidence and do not necessarily correspond to the true relative incidence as each age class is not necessarily tested in the same way, even if we discard periods of strong variation in testing policy. Indeed, even in the absence of a change in testing policy, age-specific differences in symptomatology, disease severity and the probability of developing symptoms upon infection lead to different shares of symptomatic and asymptomatic cases to be detected. Despite the fact that we can infer q-susceptibility and q-infectiousness from the observed PCR test data, we cannot further disentangle both components by estimating the aforementioned quantities simultaneously. By comparing the two separate approaches, the estimation of the relative q-susceptibility seems most informative, since proportionality factors are better constrained by the data. More specifically, the estimated q-susceptibility was identifiable when fitting to real incidence data while q-infectiousness estimates were estimated to be zero for certain age classes, which seems an artefact of the methodology. Another limitation of the proposed method is that a further decomposition of q-susceptibility (or q-infectiousness) in clinical susceptibility (infectiousness) and other external factors relevant for transmission between susceptible and infectious per...
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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