September 18, 2020

Social Network Analysis Methods for Exploring SARS-CoV-2 Contact Tracing Data

Category: Article Summary

Topic: Public Health Policy and Practice

Keywords (Tags): transmission

• Social network analysis was applied to contact tracing data (1,959 patients in India), demonstrating how the approach can identify key individual patients and components of the network that could inform the public health response. The analysis showed that 11% of patients acted as a source of infection to 40% of the other patients, while 12 out of 221 of source patients were identified as more influential and had collectively infected 38% of secondary patients.

Nagarajan et al. (Sept 17, 2020). Social Network Analysis Methods for Exploring SARS-CoV-2 Contact Tracing Data. BMC Medical Research Methodology. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-020-01119-3