ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Characterizing superspreading events and age-specific infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in Georgia, USA.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 133 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
133 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Superspreading of SARS-CoV-2: a systematic review and meta-analysis of event attack rates and individual transmission patterns.Epidemiology and infection · 2024Pooled it
- Superspreading, overdispersion and their implications in the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the literature.BMC public health · 2023Pooled it
- The role of children in household transmission of COVID-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis.International journal of infectious diseases : IJID : official publication of the International Society for Infectious Diseases · 2022Pooled it
- Systematic review and meta-analyses of superspreading of SARS-CoV-2 infections.Transboundary and emerging diseases · 2022Pooled it
- Systematic review of empirical studies comparing the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions against COVID-19.The Journal of infection · 2021Pooled it
- Prevention of SARS-CoV-2 transmission during a large, live, indoor gathering (SPRING): a non-inferiority, randomised, controlled trial.The Lancet. Infectious diseases · 2022Trial
- Disentangling the drivers of heterogeneity in SARS-CoV-2 transmission from data on viral load and daily contact rates.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Tracking Dynamics of Superspreading Through Contacts, Exposures, and Transmissions in Edge-Based Network Epidemics.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Superspreading and the evolution of virulence.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Optimal pandemic control strategies and cost-effectiveness of COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions in the United States.BMC global and public health · 2025Article
- Personalized risk score prediction and testing policy adaptations of a COVID-19 population-based contact tracing network.Epidemiology and infection · 2025Article
- ScITree: Scalable Bayesian inference of transmission tree from epidemiological and genomic data.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Estimating Re and overdispersion in secondary cases from the size of identical sequence clusters of SARS-CoV-2.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Review
- Existence and stability of equilibria in infectious disease dynamics with behavioral feedback.Physical review. E · 2025Article
- Spatio-temporal forecasting of COVID-19 cases in the Netherlands for source and contact tracing.International journal of population data science · 2025Article
- The evolutionary cost of homophily: Social stratification facilitates stable variant coexistence and increased rates of evolution in host-associated pathogens.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Effectiveness of probabilistic contact tracing in epidemic containment: The role of superspreaders and transmission path reconstruction.PNAS nexus · 2024Article
- Exploring COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among young adults in Australia. A qualitative study.Vaccine: X · 2024Article
- Estimating the contribution of setting-specific contacts to SARS-CoV-2 transmission using digital contact tracing data.Nature communications · 2024Article
73 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
It is imperative to advance our understanding of heterogeneities in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 such as age-specific infectiousness and superspreading. To this end, it is important to exploit multiple data streams that are becoming abundantly available during the pandemic. In this paper, we formulate an individual-level spatiotemporal mechanistic framework to integrate individual surveillance data with geolocation data and aggregate mobility data, enabling a more granular understanding of the transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2. We analyze reported cases, between March and early May 2020, in five (urban and rural) counties in the state of Georgia. First, our results show that the reproductive number reduced to below one in about 2 wk after the shelter-in-place order. Superspreading appears to be widespread across space and time, and it may have a particularly important role in driving the outbreak in rural areas and an increasing importance toward later stages of outbreaks in both urban and rural settings. Overall, about 2% of cases were directly responsible for 20% of all infections. We estimate that the infected nonelderly cases (<60 y) may be 2.78 [2.10, 4.22] times more infectious than the elderly, and the former tend to be the main driver of superspreading. Our results improve our understanding of the natural history and transmission dynamics of SARS-CoV-2. More importantly, we reveal the roles of age-specific infectiousness and characterize systematic variations and associated risk factors of superspreading. These have important implications for the planning of relaxing social distancing and, more generally, designing optimal control measures.
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