Two-Way Contact Network Modeling for Identifying the Route of COVID-19 Community Transmission

• Main Authors: Sung Jin Lee, Sang Eun Lee, Ji-On Kim, Gi Bum Kim
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-03-01
• Series: Informatics
• Subjects: COVID-19; contact network; route of transmission; social network analysis; centrality; clustering
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9709/8/2/22

In this study, we address the problem originated from the fact that “The Corona 19 Epidemiological Research Support System,” developed by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is limited to analyzing the Global Positioning System (GPS) information of the confirmed COVID-19 cases alone. Consequently, we study a method that the authority predicts the transmission route of COVID-19 between visitors in the community from a spatiotemporal perspective. This method models a contact network around the first confirmed case, allowing the health authorities to conduct tests on visitors after an outbreak of COVID-19 in the community. After securing the GPS data of community visitors, it traces back to the past from the time the first confirmed case occurred and creates contact clusters at each time step. This is different from other researches that focus on identifying the movement paths of confirmed patients by forward tracing. The proposed method creates the contact network by assigning weights to each contact cluster based on the degree of proximity between contacts. Identifying the source of infection in the contact network can make us predict the transmission route between the first confirmed case and the source of infection and classify the contacts on the transmission route. In this experiment, we used 64,073 simulated data for 100 people and extracted the transmission route and a top 10 list for centrality analysis. The contacts on the route path can be quickly designated as a priority for COVID-19 testing. In addition, it is possible for the authority to extract the subjects with high influence from the centrality theory and use them for additional COVID-19 epidemic investigation that requires urgency. This model is expected to be used in the epidemic investigation requiring the quick selection of close contacts.