• K O Kwok, H H H Chan, Y Huang, Hui D S C DSC Stanley Ho Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China., P A Tambyah, W I Wei, Chau P Y K PYK JC School of Public Health and Primary Care, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China., S Y S Wong, and J W T Tang.
• JC School of Public Health and Primary Care, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China; Stanley Ho Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China; Shenzhen Research Institute of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China. Electronic address: kkokwok@cuhk.edu.hk.
• J. Hosp. Infect. 2020 Aug 1; 105 (4): 682-685.

AbstractSuper-spreading events in an outbreak can change the nature of an epidemic. Therefore, it is useful for public health teams to determine whether an ongoing outbreak has any contribution from such events, which may be amenable to interventions. We estimated the basic reproductive number (R0) and the dispersion factor (k) from empirical data on clusters of epidemiologically linked coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases in Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. This allowed us to infer the presence or absence of super-spreading events during the early phase of these outbreaks. The relatively large values of k implied that large cluster sizes, compatible with super-spreading, were unlikely.Copyright © 2020 The Healthcare Infection Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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