Diary study to estimate the human bottleneck for manual contact tracing

最近的建模结果表明，传统的接触者追踪可能太慢，无法有效控制SARS-CoV-2的传播。然而，手动（与数字相反）接触追踪不仅会受到时间延迟的影响。它还依赖于人类的注意力和记忆来进行社会交往，这远非完美。我们建议在在线日记研究中量化这种人工接触追踪的人类瓶颈。首先将要求来自两个欧洲国家的小组样本报告过去14天内每天的第一类接触者人数，使用在典型接触者追踪设置中提出的问题（研究的回顾性部分）。然后，参与者将被要求密切关注他们的社交活动，并在14天的间隔时间内报告这些活动（预期的部分）。我们假设，在预期部分，记忆丧失将被最小化，使我们能够接近日常接触的基本事实，并通过扩展，回顾部分的记忆丧失。我们假设记忆丧失是实质性的，随着时间距离的幂函数而增加，随年龄等因素而变化，并且是流行病学模型和政治决策考虑的重要定量因素。

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.