Coronavirus in Context: Coronavirus Vocabulary: What Is a Super-Spreader Event?

Hide Video Transcript

Video Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]
DR. JOHN WHYTE
Coronavirus has been teaching us a lot about infectious disease and public health, but it's also teaching us a lot of new words. I'm going to help you talk coronavirus. It really is learning a new language.

What is a super-spreader event? Super-spreading events occur when a single person in a single setting infects a large number of other people. For example, in one recent study researchers analyzed cases in Georgia and found that 20% of all infections were caused by just 2% of people with COVID-19. And in one famous case that occurred early on in the pandemic, a single super spreader known as patient 31 is thought to have infected thousands of people in South Korea by attending church services and a funeral while she had coronavirus symptoms.

[MUSIC PLAYING]