Hungary in Mask/MASZK in Hungary

Abstract

Social interactions represent one of the most important routes of transmission of COVID-19 as they influence the potential patterns of diffusion of infection throughout different segments of the population. Despite their utmost importance, the scientific community is currently lacking data collection methods that record social interactions dynamically and in detail, and in a privacy-respecting, representative way, even on an aggregated level. Here we summarize the motivation, methodology, and some early results of a coordinated process of data collection in Hungary designed to track the social mixing patterns of people in different age groups in real time during the pandemic. The Hungarian Data Provider Questionnaire (MASZK7) was released in late March 2020 during the initial phase of the COVID-19 outbreak in Hungary. This is an ongoing effort to anonymously collect age contact matrices of a voluntary population online. Moreover, it is accompanied with a nationally representative data collection campaign via telephone survey to ensure data quality. This unique process of combined data collection is an important step towards developing more precise modelling of the spread of the epidemic, and could thus contribute to the reduction of the medical and economic burden of the pandemic in Hungary.