In dynamic models of infectious disease transmission, typically variousmixing patterns are imposed on the so-called Who-Acquires-Infection-From-Whommatrix (WAIFW). These imposed mixing patterns are based on prior knowledge ofage-related social mixing behavior rather than observations. Alternatively, onecan assume that transmission rates for infections transmitted predominantlythrough non-sexual social contacts, are proportional to rates of conversationalcontact which can be estimated from a contact survey. In general, however,contacts reported in social contact surveys are proxies of those events bywhich transmission may occur and there may exist age-specific characteristicsrelated to susceptibility and infectiousness which are not captured by thecontact rates. Therefore, in this paper, transmission is modeled as the productof two age-specific variables: the age-specific contact rate and anage-specific proportionality factor, which entails an improvement of fit forthe seroprevalence of the varicella-zoster virus (VZV) in Belgium. Furthermore,we address the impact on the estimation of the basic reproduction number, usingnon-parametric bootstrapping to account for different sources of variabilityand using multi-model inference to deal with model selection uncertainty. Theproposed method makes it possible to obtain important information ontransmission dynamics that cannot be inferred from approaches traditionallyapplied hitherto.
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