Human mixing patterns are the key to understand the transmission of infectious diseases and to inform transmission models used to support public health decision-making. Contact patterns relevant for the transmission of airborne infectious disease have been estimated for several countries. However, no data was available for Russia. We thus performed a population-based survey in Tomsk, Russia, asking participants to record all their contacts in physical person during regular school/working days.

We found that the network of contacts was quite clustered, with the majority of contacts occurring between family members, students of the same school/university, and work colleagues. School represents the location with the largest number of contacts and contacts were strongly assortative by age.

The collected contact data were used to define contact matrices by age that can be readily used in epidemic models. The resulting contact matrices are openly in section DATA.

The results of our analysis are published in M. Ajelli & M. Litvinova. Estimating contact patterns relevant to the spread of infectious diseases in Russia. Journal of Theoretical Biology 419:1-7, 2017.