Pandemic blog 40: overdispersion?

So the “overdispersion hypothesis.” This has been a thing for a while. Suppose the spread of COVID is highly heterogeneous, with only a few infected people producing much of the transmission; then a) it means you can reduce the exponential rate a lot, or flip to to exponential decay, by targeting superspread events, even if you do only modest suppression on ambient socializing; b) there might be a lower herd immunity threshold, as the people gathering en masse attain high antibody prevalence faster.

How is that relatively optimistic hypothesis looking? I’m finding it hard to figure that out. This piece from the Washington Post suggests that a lot of scientists think small everyday gatherings are sufficient to drive out-of-control spread, even without large infection events.

This seems like a really important question! If paying bars and restaurants to stay closed, wearing masks when we go in buildings, and pausing big indoor weddings and parties is enough to control the pandemic until the vaccine gets here, that sure seems like it’d be the way to go. But if that’s going to be far from enough, we need to know that too.