Tracing contacts to evaluate the transmission of COVID-19 from highly exposed individuals in public transportation

Abstract

We investigate, through a data-driven contact tracing model, the transmission of COVID-19 inside buses during distinct phases of the pandemic in a large Brazilian city. From this microscopic approach, we recover the networks of close contacts within consecutive time windows. A longitudinal comparison is then performed by upscaling the traced contacts with the transmission computed from a mean-field compartmental model for the entire city. Our results show that the effective reproduction numbers inside the buses, $R{e}^{bus}$, and in the city, $R{e}^{city}$, followed a compatible behavior during the first wave of the local outbreak. Moreover, by distinguishing the close contacts of healthcare workers in the buses, we discovered that their transmission, $R{e}^{health}$, during the same period, was systematically higher than $R{e}^{bus}$. This result reinforces the need for special public transportation policies for highly exposed groups of people.

References in corpus (4)

• COVID-19 lockdown induces disease-mitigating structural changes in mobility networks
• Disease transmission through expiratory aerosols on an urban bus
• Virus spread versus contact tracing: two competing contagion processes
• Heterogeneous impact of a lockdown on inter-municipality mobility

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Tricritical behavior in epidemic dynamics with vaccination