  Accounting for population age structure and age-specific contact patterns is
crucial for accurate modelling of human infectious disease dynamics and impact.
A common approach is to use synthetic contact matrices, which estimate the
number of contacts between individuals of different ages in specific settings.
These contact matrices are frequently based on data collected from populations
with very different demographic and socioeconomic characteristics from the
population of interest. Here we use a comprehensive household composition
dataset based on New Zealand census and administrative data to construct
household contact matrices and a synthetic population that can be used for
modelling. We investigate the behaviour of a compartment-based and an
agent-based epidemic model parameterised using this data, compared to a
commonly used synthetic contact matrix. We find that using the household
composition data leads to lower attack rates in older age groups compared to
using the synthetic contact matrix. This difference becomes larger when
household transmission is more dominant relative to non-household transmission.
In addition, explicitly account for household structure in an agent-based
models leads to lower attack rates at all ages. We provide electronic versions
of the synthetic population and household contact matrix for other researchers
to use in infectious disease models.
