Open AccessHungary in Mask/MASZK in Hungary
Author(s) -
Márton Karsai,
Júlia Koltai,
Orsolya Vásárhelyi,
Gergely Röst
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
corvinus journal of sociology and social policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.127
H-Index - 4
eISSN - 2062-087X
pISSN - 2061-5558
DOI - 10.14267/cjssp.2020.2.9
Subject(s) - data collection , pandemic , population , process (computing) , covid-19 , data quality , geography , transmission (telecommunications) , quality (philosophy) , data science , business , internet privacy , computer science , demography , sociology , marketing , medicine , telecommunications , social science , disease , metric (unit) , philosophy , epistemology , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty) , operating system
Social interactions represent one of the most important routes of transmissionof COVID-19 as they influence the potential patterns of diffusion of infectionthroughout different segments of the population. Despite their utmost importance,the scientific community is currently lacking data collection methods thatrecord social interactions dynamically and in detail, and in a privacy-respecting,representative way, even on an aggregated level. Here we summarize themotivation, methodology, and some early results of a coordinated process ofdata collection in Hungary designed to track the social mixing patterns of peoplein different age groups in real time during the pandemic. The Hungarian DataProvider Questionnaire (MASZK7) was released in late March 2020 during theinitial phase of the COVID-19 outbreak in Hungary. This is an ongoing effortto anonymously collect age contact matrices of a voluntary population online.Moreover, it is accompanied with a nationally representative data collectioncampaign via telephone survey to ensure data quality. This unique process of combined data collection is an important step towards developing moreprecise modelling of the spread of the epidemic, and could thus contribute tothe reduction of the medical and economic burden of the pandemic in Hungary.