Superspreaders, infected individuals who result in an outsized number of secondary cases, are believed to underlie a significant fraction of total SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Scientists combined empirical observations of SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 transmission and extreme value statistics to show that the distribution of secondary cases is consistent with being fat-tailed, implying that large superspreading events are extremal, yet probable, occurrences.
They then integrated these results with interaction-based network models of disease transmission and show that superspreading, when it is fat-tailed, leads to pronounced transmission by increasing dispersion.
The findings of the study indicate that large superspreading events should be the targets of interventions that minimize tail exposure.
Superspreading has been recognized as an important phenomenon arising from…