It’s About the Dispersion Factor

A new story by Zeynep Tufekci in The Atlantic reports on why a small percentage of people and clusters appear to be responsible for most Covid-19 infections, and what that means. It turns out that R0 might be less informative during Covid-19 than initially thought. Tufekci writes:

“Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it.

This highly-skewed, imbalanced distribution means that…