‘Superspreaders’ Could Actually Make Covid-19 Easier to ControlThe disease that was the main focus of the paper was the coronavirus-caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome that had emerged in China two years before and spread rapidly into several other Asian countries and Canada before being contained. The authors devised a new variable, “k,†to reflect the distribution of individual infectiousness, with a low k meaning a more skewed spread. They assigned SARS a k of 0.16. Estimates of the k of the pandemic influenza of 1918 hover around 1, journalist and molecular biologist Kai Kupferschmidt reported last week in an excellent Science magazine account of the superspreading phenomenon. In response to the article, the lead author of the 2005 Nature study, Jamie Lloyd-Smith of the University of California at Los Angeles, tweeted that his
provisional estimate of Covid-19’s k is 0.17. (Epidemiology Twitter is where it’s at, people.)
What can we do with these estimates of k? In 2005, Lloyd-Smith and his co-authors ran computer simulations of thousands of hypothetical epidemics, and found that
diseases with a k nearing 0.1 were much more likely to fizzle out on their own or be stopped by modest control measures than those with a k of 0.5 or higher.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-28/superspreader-events-might-actually-help-control-covid-19
