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Social network analysis methods for exploring SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing data

BACKGROUND: Contact tracing data of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic is used to estimate basic epidemiological parameters. Contact tracing data could also be potentially used for assessing the heterogeneity of transmission at the individual patient level. Charact...

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Autores principales: Nagarajan, Karikalan, Muniyandi, Malaisamy, Palani, Bharathidasan, Sellappan, Senthil
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7494745/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32942988
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12874-020-01119-3
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author Nagarajan, Karikalan
Muniyandi, Malaisamy
Palani, Bharathidasan
Sellappan, Senthil
author_facet Nagarajan, Karikalan
Muniyandi, Malaisamy
Palani, Bharathidasan
Sellappan, Senthil
author_sort Nagarajan, Karikalan
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Contact tracing data of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic is used to estimate basic epidemiological parameters. Contact tracing data could also be potentially used for assessing the heterogeneity of transmission at the individual patient level. Characterization of individuals based on different levels of infectiousness could better inform the contact tracing interventions at field levels. METHODS: Standard social network analysis methods used for exploring infectious disease transmission dynamics was employed to analyze contact tracing data of 1959 diagnosed SARS-CoV-2 patients from a large state of India. Relational network data set with diagnosed patients as “nodes” and their epidemiological contact as “edges” was created. Directed network perspective was utilized in which directionality of infection emanated from a “source patient” towards a “target patient”. Network measures of “ degree centrality” and “betweenness centrality” were calculated to identify influential patients in the transmission of infection. Components analysis was conducted to identify patients connected as sub- groups. Descriptive statistics was used to summarise network measures and percentile ranks were used to categorize influencers. RESULTS: Out-degree centrality measures identified that of the total 1959 patients, 11.27% (221) patients have acted as a source of infection to 40.19% (787) other patients. Among these source patients, 0.65% (12) patients had a higher out-degree centrality (> = 10) and have collectively infected 37.61% (296 of 787), secondary patients. Betweenness centrality measures highlighted that 7.50% (93) patients had a non-zero betweenness (range 0.5 to 135) and thus have bridged the transmission between other patients. Network component analysis identified nineteen connected components comprising of influential patient’s which have overall accounted for 26.95% of total patients (1959) and 68.74% of epidemiological contacts in the network. CONCLUSIONS: Social network analysis method for SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing data would be of use in measuring individual patient level variations in disease transmission. The network metrics identified individual patients and patient components who have disproportionately contributed to transmission. The network measures and graphical tools could complement the existing contact tracing indicators and could help improve the contact tracing activities.
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spelling pubmed-74947452020-09-17 Social network analysis methods for exploring SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing data Nagarajan, Karikalan Muniyandi, Malaisamy Palani, Bharathidasan Sellappan, Senthil BMC Med Res Methodol Research Article BACKGROUND: Contact tracing data of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic is used to estimate basic epidemiological parameters. Contact tracing data could also be potentially used for assessing the heterogeneity of transmission at the individual patient level. Characterization of individuals based on different levels of infectiousness could better inform the contact tracing interventions at field levels. METHODS: Standard social network analysis methods used for exploring infectious disease transmission dynamics was employed to analyze contact tracing data of 1959 diagnosed SARS-CoV-2 patients from a large state of India. Relational network data set with diagnosed patients as “nodes” and their epidemiological contact as “edges” was created. Directed network perspective was utilized in which directionality of infection emanated from a “source patient” towards a “target patient”. Network measures of “ degree centrality” and “betweenness centrality” were calculated to identify influential patients in the transmission of infection. Components analysis was conducted to identify patients connected as sub- groups. Descriptive statistics was used to summarise network measures and percentile ranks were used to categorize influencers. RESULTS: Out-degree centrality measures identified that of the total 1959 patients, 11.27% (221) patients have acted as a source of infection to 40.19% (787) other patients. Among these source patients, 0.65% (12) patients had a higher out-degree centrality (> = 10) and have collectively infected 37.61% (296 of 787), secondary patients. Betweenness centrality measures highlighted that 7.50% (93) patients had a non-zero betweenness (range 0.5 to 135) and thus have bridged the transmission between other patients. Network component analysis identified nineteen connected components comprising of influential patient’s which have overall accounted for 26.95% of total patients (1959) and 68.74% of epidemiological contacts in the network. CONCLUSIONS: Social network analysis method for SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing data would be of use in measuring individual patient level variations in disease transmission. The network metrics identified individual patients and patient components who have disproportionately contributed to transmission. The network measures and graphical tools could complement the existing contact tracing indicators and could help improve the contact tracing activities. BioMed Central 2020-09-17 /pmc/articles/PMC7494745/ /pubmed/32942988 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12874-020-01119-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2020 Open AccessThis 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/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://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 Article
Nagarajan, Karikalan
Muniyandi, Malaisamy
Palani, Bharathidasan
Sellappan, Senthil
Social network analysis methods for exploring SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing data
title Social network analysis methods for exploring SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing data
title_full Social network analysis methods for exploring SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing data
title_fullStr Social network analysis methods for exploring SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing data
title_full_unstemmed Social network analysis methods for exploring SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing data
title_short Social network analysis methods for exploring SARS-CoV-2 contact tracing data
title_sort social network analysis methods for exploring sars-cov-2 contact tracing data
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7494745/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32942988
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12874-020-01119-3
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