Estimating the memory bottleneck for contact tracing - Data and Codebooks

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 this decline for age- and gender-representative samples from the UK 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 diary. We further find that these factors interact with delay: Older subjects and those who made no use of memory aids have steeper memory decline functions. These findings can inform epidemiological modelling and policies in the context of infectious diseases