Changes of social contacts due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the dependence on weather parameters

The Covid-Pandemic determines social life since the beginning of 2020. Several lockdowns forced people to reduce their social contacts, especially private contacts during their spare time. For fear of infection, some people even reduced their contacts over the whole time of the pandemic. The global virus pandemic is characterised by seasonal waves with periodically increasing and decreasing incidence. This periodic variability depends on many factors. Of central relevance are all kinds of social meetings and gatherings.  Covid-19 is an airborne disease and, hence, indoor meetings and activities without masks pose a significant higher risk of infection than outdoor meetings. The decision to meet indoors or outdoors depends largely on the waether -- amongst other parameters such as the kind of activity (sport, picnic, cooking, gaming, singing) or the composition and background of the  group (band, sports group, study group, students, parents with kids). The type of outdoor activity is strongly dependent on the weather.

In a two-way approach of surveys and data analysis, we want to find out how weather parameters such as temperature, wind, precipitation, cloudiness, etc. influence the decision to meet indoors or outdoors. On the one hand, surveys and interviews of students give insight into the special situation oft he social life of students during the pandemic. On the other hand, DWD weather observations of several German cities, contact data and infections numbers are statistically analysed in order to detect possible relationships between the parameters. In this work, we will present first results of this recently started project.