Superspreading events
A characteristic of the SARS outbreak was the variability of transmissibility between cases and the occurrence of ‘superspreading events’ where a case infected significantly more contacts than the average. This was also seen with MERS in the outbreak in the Republic of Korea (RoK). In this current novel coronavirus outbreak, such superspreading events have not been documented but the epidemiology is still not clear. Confirming whether or not this is happening must be an urgent task for the Chinese investigation. Modellers have suggested reproductive rates (R0) of 3.8 (95% confidence interval, 3.6–4.0) [5] and 2.6 (1.5–3.5) [6]; R0 for SARS was estimated at around 3 in the absence of control measures [7].