Friday, June 12

Most COVID cases don’t spread virus—it’s the superspreaders we need to stop

Crowds of people walk along the Ocean City Boardwalk during Memorial Day weekend on Sunday, May 24, 2020.

Enlarge / Crowds of people walk along the Ocean City Boardwalk during Memorial Day weekend on Sunday, May 24, 2020. (credit: Getty | Caroline Brehman)

Much about how the new coronavirus spreads from one victim to the next remains a maddening mystery. But amid all the frantic efforts to understand transmission, there is one finding that appears consistent: that it is inconsistent.

Some people—most, even—don’t spread the virus to anyone in the course of their infection. Others infect dozens at a time.

It’s a phenomenon that looked, at first, like anomalous anecdotes—a large outbreak from a Washington choir practice, a South Korean megachurch, a wedding in Jordan—but it has become a fixed feature of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. And researchers have started to settle on numbers for it.

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