ArticleBMC public health2023
Longitudinal social contact data analysis: insights from 2 years of data collection in Belgium during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Article in BMC public health, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 16 citations in OpenAlex.
- A scoping review of COVID-19 modelling studies in Belgium 2020-2024: incorporation of behaviour and lessons learned.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2026Pooled it
- Belgium's SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing effectively curbed transmission, yet challenges persist in terms of delays, scalability and population adherence.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Addressing survey fatigue bias in longitudinal social contact studies to improve pandemic preparedness.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The role of frailty in shaping social contact patterns in Belgium, 2022-2023.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Assessing the role of children in the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium using perturbation analysis.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Social contact patterns in South Korea: an analysis of a survey conducted in 2023-2024.BMC infectious diseases · 2025Article
- Preserving friendships in school contacts: An algorithm to construct synthetic temporal networks for epidemic modelling.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Social contact patterns following the COVID-19 pandemic: a snapshot of post-pandemic behaviour from the CoMix study.Epidemics · 2024Article
- Repetition in social contacts: implications in modelling the transmission of respiratory infectious diseases in pre-pandemic and pandemic settings.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Impact of tiered measures on social contact and mixing patterns of in Italy during the second wave of COVID-19.BMC public health · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
15 authors at 6 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, the CoMix study, a longitudinal behavioral survey, was designed to monitor social contacts and public awareness in multiple countries, including Belgium. As a longitudinal survey, it is vulnerable to participants' "survey fatigue", which may impact inferences.
methodsA negative binomial generalized additive model for location, scale, and shape (NBI GAMLSS) was adopted to estimate the number of contacts reported between age groups and to deal with under-reporting due to fatigue within the study. The dropout process was analyzed with first-order auto-regressive logistic regression to identify factors that influence dropout. Using the so-called next generation principle, we calculated the effect of under-reporting due to fatigue on estimating the reproduction number.
resultsFewer contacts were reported as people participated longer in the survey, which suggests under-reporting due to survey fatigue. Participant dropout is significantly affected by household size and age categories, but not significantly affected by the number of contacts reported in any of the two latest waves. This indicates covariate-dependent missing completely at random (MCAR) in the dropout pattern, when missing at random (MAR) is the alternative. However, we cannot rule out more complex mechanisms such as missing not at random (MNAR). Moreover, under-reporting due to fatigue is found to be consistent over time and implies a 15-30% reduction in both the number of contacts and the reproduction number ([Formula: see text]) ratio between correcting and not correcting for under-reporting. Lastly, we found that correcting for fatigue did not change the pattern of relative incidence between age groups also when considering age-specific heterogeneity in susceptibility and infectivity.
conclusionsCoMix data highlights the variability of contact patterns across age groups and time, revealing the mechanisms governing the spread/transmission of COVID-19/airborne diseases in the population. Although such longitudinal contact surveys are prone to the under-reporting due to participant fatigue and drop-out, we showed that these factors can be identified and corrected using NBI GAMLSS. This information can be used to improve the design of similar, future surveys.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.