Superspreading and the effect of individual variation on disease emergence
TLDR
It is shown that contact tracing data from eight directly transmitted diseases shows that the distribution of individual infectiousness around R0 is often highly skewed, and implications for outbreak control are explored, showing that individual-specific control measures outperform population-wide measures.Abstract:
Population-level analyses often use average quantities to describe heterogeneous systems, particularly when variation does not arise from identifiable groups. A prominent example, central to our current understanding of epidemic spread, is the basic reproductive number, R(0), which is defined as the mean number of infections caused by an infected individual in a susceptible population. Population estimates of R(0) can obscure considerable individual variation in infectiousness, as highlighted during the global emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) by numerous 'superspreading events' in which certain individuals infected unusually large numbers of secondary cases. For diseases transmitted by non-sexual direct contacts, such as SARS or smallpox, individual variation is difficult to measure empirically, and thus its importance for outbreak dynamics has been unclear. Here we present an integrated theoretical and statistical analysis of the influence of individual variation in infectiousness on disease emergence. Using contact tracing data from eight directly transmitted diseases, we show that the distribution of individual infectiousness around R(0) is often highly skewed. Model predictions accounting for this variation differ sharply from average-based approaches, with disease extinction more likely and outbreaks rarer but more explosive. Using these models, we explore implications for outbreak control, showing that individual-specific control measures outperform population-wide measures. Moreover, the dramatic improvements achieved through targeted control policies emphasize the need to identify predictive correlates of higher infectiousness. Our findings indicate that superspreading is a normal feature of disease spread, and to frame ongoing discussion we propose a rigorous definition for superspreading events and a method to predict their frequency.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Nowcasting and forecasting the potential domestic and international spread of the 2019-nCoV outbreak originating in Wuhan, China: a modelling study.
TL;DR: It is inferred that epidemics are already growing exponentially in multiple major cities of China with a lag time behind the Wuhan outbreak of about 1–2 weeks, and that other major Chinese cities are probably sustaining localised outbreaks.
Journal ArticleDOI
How will country-based mitigation measures influence the course of the COVID-19 epidemic?
TL;DR: In this view, COVID-19 has developed into a pandemic, with small chains of transmission in many countries and large chains resulting in extensive spread in a few countries, such as Italy, Iran, South Korea, and Japan and it is unclear whether other countries can implement the stringent measures China eventually adopted.
Journal ArticleDOI
Early dynamics of transmission and control of COVID-19: a mathematical modelling study.
Adam J. Kucharski,Timothy W Russell,Charlie Diamond,Yang Liu,John Edmunds,Sebastian Funk,Rosalind M Eggo,Fiona Yueqian Sun,Mark Jit,James D Munday,Nicholas G Davies,Amy Gimma,Kevin van Zandvoort,Hamish Gibbs,Joel Hellewell,Christopher I Jarvis,Samuel Clifford,Billy J Quilty,Nikos I Bosse,Sam Abbott,Petra Klepac,Stefan Flasche +21 more
TL;DR: A stochastic transmission model is combined with data on cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Wuhan and international cases that originated inWuhan to estimate how transmission had varied over time during January, 2020, and February, 2020.
Journal ArticleDOI
Feasibility of controlling COVID-19 outbreaks by isolation of cases and contacts
Joel Hellewell,Sam Abbott,Amy Gimma,Nikos I Bosse,Christopher I Jarvis,Timothy W Russell,James D Munday,Adam J. Kucharski,W. John Edmunds,Fiona Yueqian Sun,Stefan Flasche,Billy J Quilty,Nicholas B. Davies,Yang Liu,Samuel Clifford,Petra Klepac,Mark Jit,Charlie Diamond,Hamish Gibbs,Kevin van Zandvoort,Sebastian Funk,Rosalind M Eggo +21 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors used a stochastic transmission model to assess if isolation and contact tracing are able to control onwards transmission from imported cases of COVID-19, and they used the model to quantify the potential effectiveness of contact tracing and isolation of cases at controlling a severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)-like pathogen.
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Antibiotic resistance and its cost: is it possible to reverse resistance?
Dan I. Andersson,Diarmaid Hughes +1 more
TL;DR: The findings suggest that the fitness costs of resistance will allow susceptible bacteria to outcompete resistant bacteria if the selective pressure from antibiotics is reduced, and that the rate of reversibility will be slow at the community level.
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