Impact of temporal patterns in working contacts on epidemic spread
Abstract
Abstract Most models for infectious disease spread simplify contact heterogeneity by assuming constant rates within a week. However, empirical studies show clear variation, such as reduced workplace contacts on weekends. In this work, we investigate the effects of daily variation in workplace contacts on the spread of respiratory infections using the individual-based framework GEMS (German Epidemic Micro-Simulation System) with a synthetic population of 5 million individuals. We compare the scenario with uniform daily contacts to the scenario with more contacts on workdays and fewer on weekends, keeping weekly totals constant. Simulations reveal that uniform contact rates yield higher prevalence for short latent periods (1–2 days) and lower prevalence for longer latencies (5–6 days). The effect diminishes for long infectious periods ( $$\ge$$ 7 days) but is more pronounced at lower basic reproduction numbers. Depending on the disease specification and the differences in weekday contacts, the impact of weekday heterogeneity can be very strong. These findings open new possibilities for weekday-dependent mitigation measures. We conclude that weekly contact dynamics should be explicitly incorporated into epidemic models to avoid systematic errors in reproduction number estimation.
Article Details
Authors (42)
Johannes Horn
Rafael Mikolajczyk
Carla Hartmann
Aleksandr Bryzgalov
Beryl Musundi
Chao Xu
Mahreen Kahkashan
Myka Sarajan
Julian Patzner
Hannah Derwanz
Johannes Ponge
Bernd Hellingrath
André Karch
Veronika K . Jaeger
Janik Suer
Huynh Thi Phuong
Mirjam Kretzschmar
University Medical Center Utrecht
Vitaly Belik
Andrzej K. Jarynowski
Marlli Zambrano
Steven Schulz
Department of Physics and Astronomy
Richard Pastor
Alejandra Rincon
Ashish Thampi
Alexander Kuhlmann
André Calero Valdez
Lilian Kojan
Markus Scholz
Jan Pablo Burgard
Soheil Shams
João Vitor Pamplona
Wolfgang Bock
Lukas Bayer
Sudarshan Tiwari
Berit Lange
Isti Rodiah
Wolfgang Greiner
Maren Steinmann
Sebastian Gruhn
Uwe Siebert
Beate Jahn
Tyll Krueger