Thread by @bopanc

Research shows that supersprreader evens drive the #coronavirus pandemic. That means no crowds at sports events, a limit on wedding guests. Some scientists think banning mass gatherings may be enough to keep #Covid19 in check. My piece via ⁦@WSJ⁩ wsj.com/articles/super…

Banning mass events where hundreds of attendants can infect themselves in the space of a few hours, along with other measures such as face masks, might slow the pace of the #coronavirus progression to a manageable level even as shops and factories reopen wsj.com/articles/super…

Researchers believe that the explosive growth of coronavirus infections that overwhelmed hospitals in some countries was primarily driven by such events—horse races in Britain, Carnival festivities in the U.S. and Germany or a soccer match in Italy @WSJ wsj.com/articles/super…

Carnival goers showed stronger symptoms and a comparatively severe illness, @hendrikstreeck says, possibly because they received a higher load of the virus due to the close and prolonged exposure @WSJ wsj.com/articles/super…

The Mardi Gras festivities in Louisiana, a choir practice in Skagit County, Washington, and a meeting of executives of the Biogen drug company near Boston are among the one-off events scientists think helped give the epidemic a fateful boost @WSJ wsj.com/articles/super…

“It is now pretty clear that large groups of people close together are good opportunities to spread the virus,’’ said @mlipsitch, professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health wsj.com/articles/super…

Fascinating: Hong Kong dealt swiftly with both Sars & #Covid19. Both viruses were driven by superspreading events (the spikes). Wrong to assume HG is performing so well now only only bc of Sars - they did equally well in 2003. @Birdyword @stuartlauscmp wsj.com/articles/super…

In Britain, where #Covid19 death rates soar, mass events took place in March, including large-scale concerts, soccer games and horse races. #Coronavirus-related hospitalizations and mortality have since spiked in the respective regions wsj.com/articles/super…

When London reduced the number of subway trains in March—causing greater crowding—they created superspreading conditions, said @MLevitt_NP2013 He advocates the use of face masks and regular testing of bus drivers, shopkeepers and delivery couriers @WSJ wsj.com/articles/super…

#Sweden, which never had a mandatory lockdown, managed to control and then reduce the spread by relying on only one restrictive measure: prohibiting gatherings of over 50 people wsj.com/articles/super…

The graph is courtesy of Prof. Michael Small

“This could well be the end of the open-plan office,” he said. “(...)superspreading events cause bursts of infection that fuel exponential growth, but that can very quickly be reduced to linear growth if you limit the mass gathering of people.” wsj.com/articles/super…

"Super-spreaders and the rate of transmission of the SARS virus" - interesting study from 2006, shows some similarities in how the two coronaviruses spread
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

The basic reproduction number R, which has been widely used and misused to characterize the transmissibility
of #coronavirus, hides the fact that transmission is stochastic, dominated by a small number of individuals, and driven by super-spreading events covid.idmod.org/data/Stochasti…

covid.idmod.org/data/Stochasti…

Some of lessons from the research are already being applied. In Germany, choral singing is banned from religious services & Bundesliga soccer games are taking place without spectators; churches in Britain are considering a ticket system to avoid crowding wsj.com/articles/super…

Very interesting paper by @_akiraendo of @LSHTM "As most infected individuals do not contribute to the expansion of an epidemic, the effective reproduction number could be drastically reduced by preventing... superspreading events."
wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-67