Transmission pairs collected during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands, 2020-2022

During the COVID-19 pandemic in the Netherlands, transmission pairs were collected by asking reported cases whether they could identify their infector, yielding 678,482 pairs in total. This repository contains a collection of aggregated data sets of these transmission pairs:

• summary_infectees: number of infectees in transmission pairs stratified by age group, sex, week, residential province
• serial_interval: number of transmission pairs stratified by serial interval, ranging from -10 to +30 days; serial intervals outside this range have the value -11 or +31 days
• summary_serial_interval_variant: summary statistics (mean, sd and fraction negative) of serial interval for periods dominated by different SARS-CoV-2 variants
• transmission_matrix_settings: number of transmission pairs* stratified by infector age group, infectee age group and transmission setting
• transmission_matrix_vaccination: number of transmission pairs* stratified by infector age group, infectee age group, infector vaccination status and infectee vaccination status for September 2021
• transmission_pairs_Household_max70_band10_bysex_start_2020-07-01_end_2021-02-04: number of transmission pairs* in household setting, stratified by infector age group, infector sex, infectee age group and infectee sex, from 1 July 2020 to 4 February 2021 (wildtype dominant period)
• transmission_pairs_Household_max70_band10_bysex_start_2020-07-01_end_2021-03-31: number of transmission pairs* in household setting, stratified by infector age group, infector sex, infectee age group and infectee sex, from 1 July 2020 to 31 March 2021
• transmission_pairs_Household_max70_band10_bysex_start_2021-02-05_end_2021-03-31: number of transmission pairs* in household setting, stratified by infector age group, infector sex, infectee age group and infectee sex, from 5 February 2021 to 31 March 2021 (alpha variant dominant period)

* groups containing less than 5 transmission pairs are omitted

These data are used in the repositories:

• https://github.com/rivm-syso/transmission-pairs-description to assess the representativeness, validity and added value of the transmission pairs (see preprint https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.05.15.26347859)
• https://github.com/rivm-syso/transmission-pairs-susinf to estimate age-specific susceptibility and infectiousness from household transmission pairs