High-Resolution Measurements of Face-to-Face Contact Patterns in a Primary School

By Juliette Stehlé, N. Voirin, Alain Barrat, Ciro Cattuto, Lorenzo Isella, Jean-François Pinton, M. Quaggiotto, W. van den Broeck, C. Régis, B. Lina and 1 more. PLoS ONE, 2011

846 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Little quantitative information is available on the mixing patterns of children in school environments. Describing and understanding contacts between children at school would help quantify the transmission opportunities of respiratory infections and identify situations within schools where the risk of transmission is higher. We report on measurements carried out in a French school (6–12 years children), where we collected data on the time-resolved face-to-face proximity of children and teachers using a proximity-sensing infrastructure based on radio frequency identification devices. Methods and Findings Data on face-to-face interactions were collected on Thursday, October 1st and Friday, October 2nd 2009. We recorded 77,602 contact events between 242 individuals (232 children and 10 teachers). In this setting, each child has on average 323 contacts per day with 47 other children, leading to an average daily interaction time of 176 minutes. Most contacts are brief, but long contacts are also observed. Contacts occur mostly within each class, and each child spends on average three times more time in contact with classmates than with children of other classes. We describe the temporal evolution of the contact network and the trajectories followed by the children in the school, which constrain the contact patterns. We determine an exposure matrix aimed at informing mathematical models. This matrix exhibits a class and age structure which is very different from the homogeneous mixing hypothesis. Conclusions We report on important properties of the contact patterns between school children that are relevant for modeling the propagation of diseases and for evaluating control measures. We discuss public health implications related to the management of schools in case of epidemics and pandemics. Our results can help define a prioritization of control measures based on preventive measures, case isolation, classes and school closures, that could reduce the disruption to education during epidemics.

Subfields: Information Systems, Modeling and Simulation, Pulmonary and Respiratory Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba037fe67cfa6e6676915bc31825e5ac532c87bb

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Citations in the corpus

Projecting social contact matrices in 152 countries using contact surveys and demographic data (2017, background): “While epidemic models that do not account for contact structure suffice for some research questions, such as prediction [15] or determining minimum vaccine coverage if there are no pockets of high transmission intensity or low coverage [16] [17] [18] [19] , assessing the effectiveness of interventio”
Simplicial closure and higher-order link prediction (2018, background): “• Contact networks [contact-high-school (25); contact-primaryschool (26)]: Nodes are persons and a simplex is a set of persons in close proximity to each other.”
Measuring Large-Scale Social Networks with High Resolution (2014, background): “described a strong age homophily in the interactions between children [59].”
Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, Third Edition (2014, background): “This is a good example of how communities can be displayed by a network (Stehlé et al., 2011).”
Contact Patterns among High School Students (2014, background): “For instance, the fact that the contact matrices are highly structured, with most contacts occurring within classes and additional structures of 2 or three classes, as also in a primary school [22], indicates that containment strategies such as the closure of single classes or groups of classes when”
Coupled disease–behavior dynamics on complex networks: A review (2015, background): “[163] [164] [165] [166] considered the active Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFID) to establish a flexible platform recording the face-to-face proximity contacts among volunteers, which had been deployed in various social contexts such as conference, museum, hospital, and primary school; an”