Abstract

Social contact surveys are important for informing mathematical models of infectious disease spread. However, surveys often suffer from biases. Here we discuss the motivation, the implementation and the challenges involved in setting up a longitudinal social contact survey in the midst of a pandemic. We present results from an ongoing (since June 2020) longitudinal survey of social contacts, behaviours and symptoms of university staff and students, which provides new insight into a previously understudied population. Firstly, we will discuss how our results have been used directly to inform policy and mathematical models during the COVID -19 pandemic. In addition, we will present results from a study, run in association with qualitative researchers, which investigates the perspectives of our survey respondents and those of individuals in the same population who do not complete our survey. We will present initial results and we ultimately hope that this work will improve understanding around the biases that could exist in past surveys and will inform future social contact surveys.