Superspreading of SARS-CoV-2 in the USA

Pozderac, Calvin; Skinner, Brian

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 are 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, $k$, for SARS-CoV-2 transmission during the early stages of the pandemic within the United States. We find that $\sigma_k/\mu_k \gtrsim 3.7 $, where $\mu_k$ is the mean infectiousness and $\sigma_k$ is its standard deviation, which implies pervasive superspreading. This result allows us to estimate that in the early stages of the pandemic in the USA, nearly $88\%$ of new cases were a result of the top $10\%$ of most infectious individuals.