Occupations and their impact on the spreading of COVID-19 in urban communities.

The current pandemic has disproportionally affected the workforce. To improve our understanding of the role that occupations play in the transmission of COVID-19, we analyse real-world network data that were collected in Bucharest between August 1st and October 31st 2020. The data record sex, age, and occupation of 6895 patients and the 13,272 people they have interacted with, thus providing a social network from an urban setting through which COVID-19 has spread. Quite remarkably, we find that medical occupations have no significant effect on the spread of the virus. Instead, we find common transmission chains to start with infected individuals who hold jobs in the private sector and are connected with non-active alters, such as spouses, siblings, or elderly relatives. We use relational hyperevent models to assess the most likely homophily and network effects in the community transmission. We detect homophily with respect to age and anti-homophily with respect to sex and employability. We note that, although additional data would be welcomed to perform more in-depth network analyses, our findings may help public authorities better target under-performing vaccination campaigns.

The role of age in the spreading of COVID-19 across a social network in Bucharest.

We analyse officially procured data detailing the COVID-19 transmission in Romania's capital Bucharest between 1st August and 31st October 2020. We apply relational hyperevent models on 19,713 individuals with 13,377 infection ties to determine to what degree the disease spread is affected by age whilst controlling for other covariate and human-to-human transmission network effects. We find that positive cases are more likely to nominate alters of similar age as their sources of infection, thus providing evidence for age homophily. We also show that the relative infection risk is negatively associated with the age of peers, such that the risk of infection increases as the average age of contacts decreases. Additionally, we find that adults between the ages 35 and 44 are pivotal in the transmission of the disease to other age groups. Our results may contribute to better controlling future COVID-19 waves, and they also point to the key age groups which may be essential for vaccination given their prominent role in the transmission of the virus.