Daily metric backbones retain 44% to 50% of reachability from day start in two workplace contact records

We test whether static metric backbones preserve paths that must follow contact times. We use all ten observed days in each of two public workplace contact records, from 2013 and 2015. Each day has a separate backbone. Every backbone preserves all static shortest distances. It retains 89.5% and 83.0% of total pair contact time, but only 50.0% and 43.9% of daily reachability. Each active person is a separate source at day start. Each contact transmits with certainty, and the main rule permits one hop per 20-second bin. Reachability between departments retains 40.7% and 39.6%, compared with 68.0% and 68.2% within departments. Allowing unlimited hops within each simultaneous contact component gives 49.5% and 44.6% overall retention. Other distance rules also show losses. Independent temporal and static implementations pass all checks. A fresh run reproduces all numerical files and arrays. The contribution is an exact benchmark for these records and a reusable audit tool. Prior work already establishes the role of temporal order and the risks of contact filtering. These results do not contradict the static distance guarantee. They do not measure actual information flow, disease spread, or effects in a population of workplaces. The package contains original data, source checks, the analysis plan, code, full results, figures, and reproduction instructions.

temporal networks · contact networks · metric backbone · reachability · workplace · network filtering · reproducible benchmark