Epidemics
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Disease transmission is notoriously heterogeneous, and SARS-CoV-2 is no exception. A skewed distribution where few individuals or events are responsible for the majority of transmission can result in explosive, superspreading events, which produce rapid and volatile epidemic dynamics, especially early or late in epidemics. Anticipating and preventing superspreading events can produce large reductions in overall transmission rates. ⋯ However, we find that increased social distancing starting in mid-July in response to epidemic resurgence once again dropped RE below 1 in all locations by August 14. We next used the fitted model to ask: how does truncating the individual-level transmission rate distribution (which removes periods of time with especially high individual transmission rates and thus models superspreading events) affect epidemic dynamics and control? We find that interventions that truncate the transmission rate distribution while partially relaxing social distancing are broadly effective, with impacts on epidemic growth on par with the strongest population-wide social distancing observed in April, 2020. Given that social distancing interventions will be needed to maintain epidemic control until a vaccine becomes widely available, "chopping off the tail" to reduce the probability of superspreading events presents a promising option to alleviate the need for extreme general social distancing.