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 having an early run of bad luck with a few super-spreading events, or clusters, can produce dramatically different outcomes even for otherwise similar countries.”
“COVID has a very skewed distribution in its transmission patterns,” Tufekci shared on Twitter. “You can’t beat back a threat if you don’t take into account how it operates, and this skew — its overdispersion — should affect the way we do *everything* from tracing to testing. That’s what countries like Japan do.”
Focusing more on the the dispersion factor could help in controlling the outbreak. Rapid tests could be helpful for identifying clusters and potential superspreader event. Read the full story below.
