# Estimating the human bottleneck for contact tracing

## TL;DR

This study estimates how well people remember recent contacts, which is important for effective contact tracing during outbreaks.

## Contribution

The study quantifies how memory for contacts declines over time and identifies factors like age and memory aids that influence this decline.

## Key findings

- Contact reporting declines as a power function of recall delay.
- Younger people and those using memory aids report more contacts.
- Older people and those without memory aids experience steeper declines in contact reporting.

## Abstract

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted the importance of contact tracing for epidemiological mitigation. Contact tracing interviews (CTIs) typically rely on episodic memory, which is prone to decline over time. Here, we provide a quantitative estimate of reporting decline for age- and gender-representative samples from the United Kingdom and Germany, emulating >15,000 CTIs. We find that the number of reported contacts declines as a power function of recall delay and is significantly higher for younger subjects and for those who used memory aids, such as a scheduler. We further find that these factors interact with delay: Older subjects and those who made no use of memory aids have steeper decline functions. These findings can inform epidemiological modeling and policies in the context of infectious diseases.