Lockdown impact on age-specific contact patterns and behaviours, France, April 2020
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Abstract
Many countries implemented national lockdowns to contain the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 and avoid overburdening healthcare capacity.
Aim
We aimed to quantify how the French lockdown impacted population mixing, contact patterns and behaviours.
Methods
We conducted an online survey using convenience sampling and collected information from participants aged 18 years and older between 10 April and 28 April 2020.
Result
Among the 42,036 survey participants, 72% normally worked outside their home, and of these, 68% changed to telework during lockdown and 17% reported being unemployed during lockdown. A decrease in public transport use was reported from 37% to 2%. Participants reported increased frequency of hand washing and changes in greeting behaviour. Wearing masks in public was generally limited. A total of 138,934 contacts were reported, with an average of 3.3 contacts per individual per day; 1.7 in the participants aged 65 years and older compared with 3.6 for younger age groups. This represented a 70% reduction compared with previous surveys, consistent with SARS-CoV2 transmission reduction measured during the lockdown. For those who maintained a professional activity outside home, the frequency of contacts at work dropped by 79%.
Conclusion
The lockdown affected the population's behaviour, work, risk perception and contact patterns. The frequency and heterogeneity of contacts, both of which are critical factors in determining how viruses spread, were affected. Such surveys are essential to evaluate the impact of lockdowns more accurately and anticipate epidemic dynamics in these conditions.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.07.20205104: (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:The data and results presented here should be considered in the light to the following limitations. First, participants were recruited online. As a consequence, the study population may not be a representative sample of the French population. First, as frequently observed in this type of studies, two third of survey participants were …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.07.20205104: (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:The data and results presented here should be considered in the light to the following limitations. First, participants were recruited online. As a consequence, the study population may not be a representative sample of the French population. First, as frequently observed in this type of studies, two third of survey participants were women. However, the work situation (Figure S9) and contact matrices (Figure S10) did not differ significantly between males and females. In order to reproduce more accurately lockdown-associated behaviors in the French population, statistics were reweighted according to the age and sex demographics of that population. The distribution of household sizes in the weighted population (Figure S3) globally matched the one reported by INSEE in 2019 (19). The survey population is probably also over-represented by employees, executives and generally individuals working at home. It also excluded populations less connected to social networks, smartphones or internet. For example, >65 years old individuals represented only 13% of our population while they account for 20% of the French population. We estimate that during the lockdown 53% of French people worked from home, an estimate substantially higher than estimates from other sources (Direction de l’animation de la recherche des études et des statistiques, DARES or the Covid 19 Barometre, which estimated respectively 25% and 15% of telework). In order to bypass this overrepresentation, the global contact ...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We found bar graphs of continuous data. We recommend replacing bar graphs with more informative graphics, as many different datasets can lead to the same bar graph. The actual data may suggest different conclusions from the summary statistics. For more information, please see Weissgerber et al (2015).
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.
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