Society and behaviour

This work package is interested in how the pandemic is influencing people’s day-to-day lives. We are monitoring awareness of and attitudes to COVID-19 over time, assessing the effectiveness of the information provided by public health and other authorities and gathering information on how the pandemic is changing people’s behaviour. For example in relation to their contact with others. These insights will be vital in informing regional, national and international responses to the pandemic.

Key activities include:

• Rolling out CoMix; a large-scale social contact survey which gathers information on attitudes, awareness and behaviour over the course of the pandemic.
• Launching Infectieradar; a participatory surveillance platform which monitors the spread of COVID-19 through collecting health information from volunteers in real-time.
• Tracking and analysing public conversations about COVID-19 in traditional and social media outlets (online news, television, Twitter) by employing platforms like Ncov2019 Tracking. We will pay particular attention to public health messages from national and international bodies, to understand their reach and effectiveness, as well as investigating incidents of false or misleading news.
• Making rapid summaries of the data and findings widely available to keep health authorities, researchers and the wider public informed.

• Led by LSHTM: Quantifying the impact of physical distance measures on the transmission of COVID-19 in the UK
• Led by ISI: COVID-19 outbreak response, a dataset to assess mobility changes in Italy following national lockdown
• Led by ISI: Effect of manual and digital contact tracing on COVID-19 outbreaks: a study on empirical contact data
• Led by ISI: Collective Response to Media Coverage of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Reddit and Wikipedia: Mixed-Methods Analysis
• Led by UHasselt: CoMix: comparing mixing patterns in the Belgian population during and after lockdown
• Led by LSHTM: The impact of local and national restrictions in response to COVID-19 on social contacts in England: a longitudinal natural experiment
• Led by ISI: Evaluation of home detection algorithms on mobile phone data using individual-level ground truth
• Led by LSHTM: Changes in social contacts in England during the COVID-19 pandemic between March 2020 and March 2021 as measured by the CoMix survey: A repeated cross-sectional study
• Led by ISI: Early social distancing policies in Europe, changes in mobility & COVID-19 case trajectories: Insights from Spring 2020
• Led by ISI: Digital proximity tracing on empirical contact networks for pandemic control
• Led by LSHTM: Projecting contact matrices in 177 geographical regions: An update and comparison with empirical data for the COVID-19 era (proof)
• Led by ISI: Socio-economic determinants of mobility responses during the first wave of COVID-19 in Italy: from provinces to neighbourhoods 
• Led by LSHTM: Poor self-reported adherence to COVID-19-related quarantine/isolation requests, Norway, April to July 2020
• Led by UAntwerp and UHasselt: SOCRATES-CoMix: a platform for timely and open-source contact mixing data during and in between COVID-19 surges and interventions in over 20 European countries
• Led by UAntwerp and UHasselt: Inferring age-specific differences in susceptibility to and infectiousness upon SARS-CoV-2 infection based on Belgian social contact data
• Led by ISI: Are People Optimistically Biased about the Risk of COVID-19 Infection? Lessons from the First Wave of the Pandemic in Europe
• Led by ISI: Echoes through Time: Evolution of the Italian COVID-19 Vaccination Debate
• Led by UHasselt, UAntwerp and LSHTM: The influence of risk perceptions on close contact frequency during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic
• Led by LSHTM: Pregnancy during COVID-19: social contact patterns and vaccine coverage of pregnant women from CoMix in 19 European countries
• Led by UHasselt: The COVID-19 wave in Belgium during the Fall of 2020 and its association with higher education
• Led by RIVM: Risk factors associated with the incidence of self-reported COVID-19-like illness: data from a web-based syndromic surveillance system in the Netherlands
• Led by RIVM: Dynamics of non-household contacts during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 in the Netherlands
• Led by UHasselt: PRELIMINARY - NOT YET PEER REVIEWED Longitudinal social contact data analysis: insights from 2 years of data collection in Belgium during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Led by ISI: Attitudes towards booster, testing and isolation, and their impact on COVID-19 response in winter 2022/2023 in France, Belgium, and Italy: a cross-sectional survey and modelling study
• Led by UBERN: PRELIMINARY - NOT YET PEER REVIEWED Socio-demographic characteristics associated with COVID-19 vaccination uptake in Switzerland: longitudinal analysis of the CoMix study
• Led by RIVM: PRELIMINARY  - NOT YET PEER REVIEWED The influence of COVID-19 risk perception and vaccination status on the number of social contacts across Europe: insights from the CoMix study
• Led by LSHTM: Social contact patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic in 21 European countries – evidence from a two-year study
• Led by LSHTM: PRELIMINARY - NOT YET PEER REVIEWED Social contact patterns following the COVID-19 pandemic: a snapshot of post-pandemic  behaviour from the CoMix study
• Led by ISI: PRELIMINARY - NOT YET PEER REVIEWED Global misinformation spillovers in the online vaccination debate before and during COVID-19
• Led by ISI: PRELIMINARY - NOT YET PEER REVIEWED Impact of tiered measures on social contact and mixing patterns in Italy during the second wave of COVID-19
• Led by UH: PRELIMINARY - NOT YET PEER REVIEWED PRELIMINARY Who acquires infection from whom? A sensitivity analysis of transmission dynamics during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium
• Led by UHasselt: How contact patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic are related to pre-pandemic contact patterns and mobility trends

The society and behaviour workstream is led by LSHTM, with support from ISI, UHasselt, Bern and RIVM.