[Nature Medicine] Clustering and superspreading potential of SARS-CoV-2 infections in Hong Kong

Nature Medicine, 17 September 2020

Dillon C. Adam, Peng Wu, Jessica Y. Wong, Eric H. Y. Lau, Tim K. Tsang, Simon Cauchemez, Gabriel M. Leung & Benjamin J. Cowling

Highlights:

• Using contact tracing data from 1,038 SARS-CoV-2 cases confirmed between 23 January and 28 April 2020 in Hong Kong, the team identified and characterized all local clusters of infection.
• Identified 4–7 Superspreading events (SSEs) across 51 clusters (n = 309 cases) and estimated that 19% (95% confidence interval, 15–24%) of cases seeded 80% of all local transmission.
• Transmission in social settings was associated with more secondary cases than households when controlling for age.

The code used for analysis and all anonymized data collected are publicly available at https://github.com/dcadam/covid-19-sse.

Read full text