Superspreaders
What are superspreaders?
- The term “super-spreader” implies that a particular person may be inherently more able than others to pass on disease.
Factors responsible for the spread:
- The spread of a virus like the new coronavirus depends on a range of environmental and epidemiological factors that ultimately lead to transmission in individual cases or clusters.
- These include the patient and what stage of disease they are in, their behaviour, their environment, and the amount of time spent in that environment.
Why in the news?
- Studies have found that novel coronavirus is associated with super spreading events.
News in detail:
- Three separate studies using very different methods and patient cohorts have found that a small percentage of people who have been infected with novel coronavirus account for a large proportion of novel coronavirus spread, much above the expected average.
- These are called “superspreading events” (SSEs).
Reproduction number and dispersion factor:
- The number of people an infected person can spread the virus to, is called the reproduction number or R0.
- In real life, some people infect many others and others don’t spread the disease at all and hence the dispersion factor plays a role here.
- The lower the dispersion factor is, the more transmission comes from a small number of people.
SARS-CoV -2 and MERS superspreaders:
- SARS-CoV-2, with a basic reproductive number (the number of people an infected person can infect) of around three, more than eight or 10 secondary cases have been suggested to constitute a superspreading event.
- For MERS, superspreading events have reportedly involved up to 82 secondary cases.
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