Measuring close proximity interactions in summer camps during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Policy makers have implemented multiple non-pharmaceutical strategies to mitigate the COVID-19 worldwide crisis. Interventions had the aim of reducing close proximity interactions, which drive the spread of the disease. A deeper knowledge of human physical interactions has revealed necessary, especially in all settings involving children, whose education and gathering activities should be preserved. Despite their relevance, almost no data are available on close proximity contacts among children in schools or other educational settings during the pandemic.Contact data are usually gathered via Bluetooth, which nonetheless offers a low temporal and spatial resolution. Recently, ultra-wideband (UWB) radios emerged as a more accurate alternative that nonetheless exhibits a significantly higher energy consumption, limiting in-field studies. In this paper, we leverage a novel approach, embodied by the Janus system that combines these radios by exploiting their complementary benefits. The very accurate proximity data gathered in-field by Janus, once augmented with several metadata, unlocks unprecedented levels of information, enabling the development of novel multi-level risk analyses.By means of this technology, we have collected real contact data of children and educators in three summer camps during summer 2020 in the province of Trento, Italy. The wide variety of performed daily activities induced multiple individual behaviors, allowing a rich investigation of social environments from the contagion risk perspective. We consider risk based on duration and proximity of contacts and classify interactions according to different risk levels. We can then evaluate the summer camps’ organization, observe the effect of partition in small groups, or social bubbles, and identify the organized activities that mitigate the riskier behaviors.Overall, we offer an insight into the educator-child and child-child social interactions during the pandemic, thus providing a valuable tool for schools, summer camps, and policy makers to (re)structure educational activities safely.

Service quality, satisfaction and behavioural intentions in sport child camps: participants and parents' perspectives

“…Participating in sport child camps requires high energy expenditure (Franchini et al, 2021); thus, an implication to practice is that managers must continue to guarantee balanced dining options must be continued, ensuring a sufficient energy intake to participants, and the opportunity for children to improve their overall nutrition and health (Kennedy et al, 2017). On other hand, Safety seems a priority for participants (Omelan et al, 2018), because there is a potential risk of injuries and illnesses (Miller and Barth, 2016), and a high-risk of contagion of COVID-19 among participants (Leoni et al, 2022). This research was developed after the COVID-19 pandemic as started (with safety measures implemented), and the findings provide initial evidence suggesting that the lessons learnt by organizers in terms of health and safety are likely to become standard procedures from now onwards.…”

“…On other hand, Safety seems a priority for participants (Omelan et al. , 2018), because there is a potential risk of injuries and illnesses (Miller and Barth, 2016), and a high-risk of contagion of COVID-19 among participants (Leoni et al. , 2022).…”

Atas / Proceedings

“…Anualmente, milhares de crianças desfrutavam as suas férias em campos de férias (Feenstra, 2015), mas em 2020 a pandemia causada pelo COVID19, tornou-se uma ameaça séria à saúde global (Arshad et al, 2020). Devido à elevada percentagem de contactos de alto risco de contágio entre os participantes existente nestes eventos (Leoni et al, 2021), os CFD foram cancelados ou ajustados para incluírem medidas de segurança propostas pelo governo e pelas autoridades de saúde. Se a gestão dos CFD sempre foi uma tarefa complexa, a preocupação com a segurança relacionada com a pandemia exigiu maior responsabilidade das organizações dos CFD mas também a dificuldade de reter os consumidores nestes eventos.…”

Temporal clustering of social interactions trades-off disease spreading and knowledge diffusion

“…For example, in a workplace this could imply restricting face-to-face interactions only among the members of the same team or department, while in a school and in a university campus only within a classroom or a dorm. This strategy has been proposed and largely discussed, and many numerical experiments have been performed to assess the effect of social bubbles on real populations [30] and in specific contexts like schools [31][32][33][34] and workplaces [35], always showing important advantages in reducing contagions. In order to evaluate the effect of the community structure it is useful to consider synthetic networks where we can tune the modularity, i.e.…”