Diary study to estimate the human bottleneck for manual contact tracing

• Applicant: Professor Benjamin de Haas, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology ; Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine ; Statistics and Econometrics
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 458365091

Recent modelling findings suggest that classic contact tracing may be too slow to control the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 effectively. However, manual (as opposed to digital) contact tracing does not only suffer from a temporal delay. It is also reliant on human attention and memory for social contacts, which are far from perfect. We propose to quantify this human bottleneck for manual contact tracing in an online diary study. Panel samples from two European countries will first be asked to report the number of Category I contacts for each of the previous 14 days, using questions posed in typical contact tracing settings (the retrospective part of the study). Participants will then be asked to pay close attention to their social interactions and report them in 14 daily intervals (the prospective part). We hypothesize that memory loss will be minimised during the prospective part, allowing us to approximate the ground truth of daily contacts, and by extension the memory loss for the retrospective part. We hypothesize that memory loss is substantial, increases as a power function of temporal distance, varies with factors such as age and is an important quantitative factor to consider for epidemiological models and political decision making.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Samuel de Haas