Evidence that coronavirus superspreading is fat-tailed
Name
2018490117.full.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.35 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
c7b08d81b217acd2ff0d7ab07c451ee1
Author(s)
Wong, Felix
Collins, James J.
Date Issued
November 2020
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Citation
Wong, Felix and James J. Collins. "Evidence that coronavirus superspreading is fat-tailed." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (November 2020): dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2018490117.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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. Here, we combine 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. We integrate 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. Our findings indicate that large superspreading events should be the targets of interventions that minimize tail exposure.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Medical Engineering & Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biological Engineering
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2018490117
