Workplace contact layer

The workplace contact layer represents all of the pairwise connections between people in workplaces, except for teachers working in schools. After some workers are assigned to the school contact layer as teachers, all remaining workers are assigned to workplaces. Workplaces are special in that there is little/no age structure so workers of all ages may be present in every workplace.

Again, note that work and school are currently exclusive, because the people attending schools are removed from the list of eligible workers. This doesn’t necessarily need to be the case though. In fact, we know that in any countries and cultures around the world, people take on multiple roles as both students and workers, either part-time or full-time in one or both activities.

Data required

The following data are required for generating the workplace contact layer:

1. Workplace size distribution - again, this gets normalized so can be specified as absolute counts or as normalized values:

   work_size_bracket , size_count
   1-4               , 2947
   5-9               , 992
   10-19             , 639
   20-49             , 430
   50-99             , 140
   100-249           , 83
   250-499           , 26
   500-999           , 13
   1000-1999         , 12
   

2. Work contact matrix specifying the number/weight of contacts by age bin. This is similar to the household contact matrix. For example:

           20-30       , 30-40       , 40-50
   20-30   0.659867911 , 0.503965302 , 0.214772978
   30-40   0.314776879 , 0.895460015 , 0.412465791
   40-50   0.132821425 , 0.405073038 , 1.433888594
   

Workflow

1. generate_workplace_sizes() generates workplace sizes according to the workplace size distribution until the number of workers is reached.
2. assign_rest_of_workers() populates workplaces just like for households and schools: randomly selecting the age of a reference person, and then sampling the rest of the workplace using the contact matrix.