The Power of On-line Indirect Surveys to Monitor Society

Indirect surveys have been used for decades by epidemiologists and social scientists to estimate the size of sub-populations within social networks. In these surveys, respondents provide information about their social connections, making them particularly useful for monitoring hardto- reach or sensitive populations, such as disaster casualties, drug use prevalence, or the spread of infectious diseases. These indirect responses, known as Aggregated Relational Data (ARD), are analyzed using various statistical methods collectively referred to as the Network Scale-Up Method (NSUM). In this talk, we describe how indirect surveys and NSUM have been used in the CoronaSurveys project to track and estimate over 5 years the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic. The presentation will describe the software system deployed, and the algorithms used to estimate pandemic parameters over time.