Reconstructing age-specific social contact patterns across 28 EU/EEA countries during the COVID-19 pandemic: linking non-pharmaceutical interventions to social mixing, 2020-2022

A model-based framework reconstructed time-varying, age-specific social contact matrices for 28 EU/EEA countries across 2020–2022, capturing substantial temporal and cross-country variation linked to NPIs.

• Why it matters: Empirical CoMix contact data had spatiotemporal gaps, leaving some countries without pandemic mixing observations needed for epidemic modelling and policy decisions.
• What they did: The approach estimated changes in age-specific contact patterns and related them to NPIs from the ECDC-JRC Response Measures Database, then predicted contacts for periods without CoMix data and reconstructed missing countries via country-matching.
• The result: The resulting consistent set of age-specific contact matrices extends incomplete pandemic contact data across both time and countries, enabling improved analysis of how NPIs and social mixing co-varied across Europe.

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