{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/superspreading-of-sars-cov-2-in-the-usa","title":"Superspreading of SARS-CoV-2 in the USA","arxiv_id":"2007.15673","date":"2020-07-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Calvin Pozderac","Brian Skinner"],"abstract":"A number of epidemics, including the SARS-CoV-1 epidemic of 2002-2004, have been known to exhibit superspreading, in which a small fraction of infected individuals is responsible for the majority of new infections. The existence of superspreading implies a fat-tailed distribution of infectiousness (new secondary infections caused per day) among different individuals. Here, we present a simple method to estimate the variation in infectiousness by examining the variation in early-time growth rates of new cases among different subpopulations. We use this method to estimate the mean and variance in the infectiousness, $\\beta$, for SARS-CoV-2 transmission during the early stages of the pandemic within the United States. We find that $\\sigma_\\beta/\\mu_\\beta \\gtrsim 3.2$, where $\\mu_\\beta$ is the mean infectiousness and $\\sigma_\\beta$ its standard deviation, which implies pervasive superspreading. This result allows us to estimate that in the early stages of the pandemic in the USA, over 81% of new cases were a result of the top 10% of most infectious individuals.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.15673v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.15673v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"superspreading-of-sars-cov-2-in-the-usa","repo_url":"https://github.com/calvinpozderac/COVID-19-Superspreading","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}