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The influence of COVID-19 risk perception and vaccination status on the number of social contacts across Europe: insights from the CoMix study

BACKGROUND: The SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics have been greatly modulated by human contact behaviour. To curb the spread of the virus, global efforts focused on implementing both Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) and pharmaceutical interventions such as vaccination. This study was conducted...

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Autores principales: Wambua, James, Loedy, Neilshan, Jarvis, Christopher I., Wong, Kerry L. M., Faes, Christel, Grah, Rok, Prasse, Bastian, Sandmann, Frank, Niehus, Rene, Johnson, Helen, Edmunds, W.John, Beutels, Philippe, Hens, Niel, Coletti, Pietro
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10347859/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37442987
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-023-16252-z
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author Wambua, James
Loedy, Neilshan
Jarvis, Christopher I.
Wong, Kerry L. M.
Faes, Christel
Grah, Rok
Prasse, Bastian
Sandmann, Frank
Niehus, Rene
Johnson, Helen
Edmunds, W.John
Beutels, Philippe
Hens, Niel
Coletti, Pietro
author_facet Wambua, James
Loedy, Neilshan
Jarvis, Christopher I.
Wong, Kerry L. M.
Faes, Christel
Grah, Rok
Prasse, Bastian
Sandmann, Frank
Niehus, Rene
Johnson, Helen
Edmunds, W.John
Beutels, Philippe
Hens, Niel
Coletti, Pietro
author_sort Wambua, James
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: The SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics have been greatly modulated by human contact behaviour. To curb the spread of the virus, global efforts focused on implementing both Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) and pharmaceutical interventions such as vaccination. This study was conducted to explore the influence of COVID-19 vaccination status and risk perceptions related to SARS-CoV-2 on the number of social contacts of individuals in 16 European countries. METHODS: We used data from longitudinal surveys conducted in the 16 European countries to measure social contact behaviour in the course of the pandemic. The data consisted of representative panels of participants in terms of gender, age and region of residence in each country. The surveys were conducted in several rounds between December 2020 and September 2021 and comprised of 29,292 participants providing a total of 111,103 completed surveys. We employed a multilevel generalized linear mixed effects model to explore the influence of risk perceptions and COVID-19 vaccination status on the number of social contacts of individuals. RESULTS: The results indicated that perceived severity played a significant role in social contact behaviour during the pandemic after controlling for other variables (p-value < 0.001). More specifically, participants who had low or neutral levels of perceived severity reported 1.25 (95% Confidence intervals (CI) 1.13 - 1.37) and 1.10 (95% CI 1.00 - 1.21) times more contacts compared to those who perceived COVID-19 to be a serious illness, respectively. Additionally, vaccination status was also a significant predictor of contacts (p-value < 0.001), with vaccinated individuals reporting 1.31 (95% CI 1.23 - 1.39) times higher number of contacts than the non-vaccinated. Furthermore, individual-level factors played a more substantial role in influencing contact behaviour than country-level factors. CONCLUSION: Our multi-country study yields significant insights on the importance of risk perceptions and vaccination in behavioral changes during a pandemic emergency. The apparent increase in social contact behaviour following vaccination would require urgent intervention in the event of emergence of an immune escaping variant. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-023-16252-z.
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spelling pubmed-103478592023-07-15 The influence of COVID-19 risk perception and vaccination status on the number of social contacts across Europe: insights from the CoMix study Wambua, James Loedy, Neilshan Jarvis, Christopher I. Wong, Kerry L. M. Faes, Christel Grah, Rok Prasse, Bastian Sandmann, Frank Niehus, Rene Johnson, Helen Edmunds, W.John Beutels, Philippe Hens, Niel Coletti, Pietro BMC Public Health Research BACKGROUND: The SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics have been greatly modulated by human contact behaviour. To curb the spread of the virus, global efforts focused on implementing both Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) and pharmaceutical interventions such as vaccination. This study was conducted to explore the influence of COVID-19 vaccination status and risk perceptions related to SARS-CoV-2 on the number of social contacts of individuals in 16 European countries. METHODS: We used data from longitudinal surveys conducted in the 16 European countries to measure social contact behaviour in the course of the pandemic. The data consisted of representative panels of participants in terms of gender, age and region of residence in each country. The surveys were conducted in several rounds between December 2020 and September 2021 and comprised of 29,292 participants providing a total of 111,103 completed surveys. We employed a multilevel generalized linear mixed effects model to explore the influence of risk perceptions and COVID-19 vaccination status on the number of social contacts of individuals. RESULTS: The results indicated that perceived severity played a significant role in social contact behaviour during the pandemic after controlling for other variables (p-value < 0.001). More specifically, participants who had low or neutral levels of perceived severity reported 1.25 (95% Confidence intervals (CI) 1.13 - 1.37) and 1.10 (95% CI 1.00 - 1.21) times more contacts compared to those who perceived COVID-19 to be a serious illness, respectively. Additionally, vaccination status was also a significant predictor of contacts (p-value < 0.001), with vaccinated individuals reporting 1.31 (95% CI 1.23 - 1.39) times higher number of contacts than the non-vaccinated. Furthermore, individual-level factors played a more substantial role in influencing contact behaviour than country-level factors. CONCLUSION: Our multi-country study yields significant insights on the importance of risk perceptions and vaccination in behavioral changes during a pandemic emergency. The apparent increase in social contact behaviour following vaccination would require urgent intervention in the event of emergence of an immune escaping variant. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12889-023-16252-z. BioMed Central 2023-07-13 /pmc/articles/PMC10347859/ /pubmed/37442987 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-023-16252-z Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Wambua, James
Loedy, Neilshan
Jarvis, Christopher I.
Wong, Kerry L. M.
Faes, Christel
Grah, Rok
Prasse, Bastian
Sandmann, Frank
Niehus, Rene
Johnson, Helen
Edmunds, W.John
Beutels, Philippe
Hens, Niel
Coletti, Pietro
The influence of COVID-19 risk perception and vaccination status on the number of social contacts across Europe: insights from the CoMix study
title The influence of COVID-19 risk perception and vaccination status on the number of social contacts across Europe: insights from the CoMix study
title_full The influence of COVID-19 risk perception and vaccination status on the number of social contacts across Europe: insights from the CoMix study
title_fullStr The influence of COVID-19 risk perception and vaccination status on the number of social contacts across Europe: insights from the CoMix study
title_full_unstemmed The influence of COVID-19 risk perception and vaccination status on the number of social contacts across Europe: insights from the CoMix study
title_short The influence of COVID-19 risk perception and vaccination status on the number of social contacts across Europe: insights from the CoMix study
title_sort influence of covid-19 risk perception and vaccination status on the number of social contacts across europe: insights from the comix study
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10347859/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37442987
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-023-16252-z
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