Estimating the typical rate of contact forgetting

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted the importance and challenges of contact tracing for epidemiological mitigation. One of these challenges is forgetting. Contact tracing interviews (CTIs) typically rely on human memory, which is prone to decline over time. A robust estimate of contact forgetting can inform epidemiological modelling and policies in the context of infectious diseases. Here we aim to quantify the typical contact forgetting function using panel data from age and gender representative participants from Germany and the UK, emulating 15.000 CTIs. We hypothesize that the number of remembered contacts will decline as a power function of recall delay and that this decline is steeper for older participants. unknown other