In the context of contact tracing, I tried to find whether the number of contacts people have follows some well known distribution, e.g. Gaussian, Zipf etc. But I'm coming up empty. Were any such studies conducted? I did find a somewhat vague discussion:
A leading factor that determines the strengths of these statistical biases is the structural properties of the underlying contact network itself, in particular the heterogeneity of the degree (that is, the number of contacts). Heterogeneous networks, where the number of contacts varies substantially among individuals, have a larger variance in the degree, which in turn produces a stronger friendship paradox effect. Real networks are known to be heterogeneous, with strong implications for epidemiology because these properties alter the fundamental nature of the epidemic dynamics in the form of, for example, vanishing epidemic threshold, hierarchical spreading, and large variance in an individual’s reproductive number, as well as the final outbreak size.
This seems to suggest that some kind of muti-modal or maybe Zipf law holds for contacts, but has any concrete distribution been (best) fitted?
