From Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health:
Rather than using the term super spreaders (a person who infects a large number of people), we should think of them as super spreading events. Maybe a person is at the right time of infection and at the mall. Typhoid Mary infected many people because she was a cook.
Part of the reason we stopped SARS is that a lot of super spreading was happening in health care settings and when people really got their act together in terms of infection control and biocontainment, it nipped the epidemic in the bud.
Super spreading events have the largest influence an outbreak’s trajectory early on. If there’s only a few cases and one person then infects 10 others, it can make it start strong. Once an epidemic gets going and has 100 to 200 cases or more, the “law of large numbers” takes over—and it stops mattering so much.
Justin Lessler is an associate professor of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.