New paper in BMC Infectious Diseases

Published: April 23, 2013

We have just published a new paper in BMC Infectious Diseases. We use SocioPatterns data collected in a hospital ward to ask which representations of contact data work best to inform models of disease spread. We show that the commonly used contact matrix representation fails to reproduce the size of the epidemic obtained using the high-resolution contact data and also fails to identify the most at-risk classes. We introduce a contact matrix of probability distributions that takes into account the heterogeneity of contact durations between (and within) classes of individuals, and we show that, in the case study presented, this representation yields a good approximation of the epidemic spreading properties obtained by using the high-resolution data.