Investigating spatiotemporal indoor contact patterns using ABM and STKDE

ABSTRACT

The transmission of infectious disease, including SARS-CoV-2, mainly takes place indoors through close contact of individuals. The federal government issued the social distancing guideline of 6 feet to curb the spread. However, such static guidelines might fail to decrease contacts since they ignore space-dependent pedestrian movement. Therefore, we built an agent-based model (ABM) to investigate contact patterns when people enter a large venue, such as a sports arena. In addition, we explore the spatiotemporal contact patterns using space-time kernel density estimation (STKDE). Our results indicate a significant reduction of contacts when controlling the entrance time intervals (time between individual entrances to the venue). In addition, many contacts occur between individuals who move inside the seating section to seek their own seat and those who already sit. This implies we need to find additional solutions to reduce contacts in the seating section in the future study. This research could help decision makers to form detailed social distancing requirements, especially depending on the spatial structure of large indoor spaces. © 2021 ACM.