Superspreader vs Common People

Superspreader is a person who plays a disproportionate role in spreading a disease. A superspreading trend is evident for Covid-19 too.

Source: [4]

Superspreader

Typhoid Mary, a cook, is perhaps history’s most famous superspreader, infecting 50 people and killing three. Sadly, she was quarantined for life on North Brother Island, near the Bronx. Science commentator Anjana Ahuja thinks we have something to learn from her case. Studies suggest 80 per cent of coronavirus spread comes from 20 per cent of infected people. Tracing these spreaders is key to containing the disease.

Similarly, in the current Covid-19, a new chain of transmission has begun in Europe after a suspected “superspreader” travelled from a Singapore conference to a French ski resort, infecting four adults and a child.  The man returned to the UK on 28 January before being diagnosed with the virus himself later.

Common People

If the pathogen is to be contained, then the analysis of its spread needs to be more granular than simply measuring R, the reproduction number. R is the average number of people a carrier passes the disease to, but is just that: an average.

“The consistent pattern is that the most common number is zero,” professor Jamie Lloyd-Smith, from the University of California, Los Angeles, told the journal Science. “Most people do not transmit.”

Super Spreader Events

Dr. Fauci, however, has emphasized that it's the super spreader events rather than the super spreaders that we should try to avoid.   We have witnessed many such super spreader events in the past. The recent one was reported on Wednesday (10/28/2020):^[7]

On Wednesday, county officials said they were coping with the fallout from two more so-called superspreader events that left 56 people with the virus and nearly 300 in quarantine: a wedding that exceeded the state’s 50-person limit and a birthday party that did not.

References

1. To beat Covid-19, find today’s superspreading ‘Typhoid Marys’
2. Coronavirus: Five Britons in French ski chalet catch virus
3. UK warns coronavirus outbreak will ‘get worse before it gets better’
4. COVID-19: Specific and Non-Specific Clinical Manifestations and Symptoms: The Current State of Knowledge
5. A COVID-19 vaccine: 5 things that could go wrong
6. One Meeting in Boston Seeded Tens of Thousands of Infections, Study Finds
• A February meeting of biotech executives became a coronavirus “superspreading” event with a transmission chain across the globe.
7. Wedding and Birthday Party Infect 56, Leaving Nearly 300 in Quarantine
8. Coronavirus: What is the R number and how is it calculated?