Folks asking me if this skew—that a few account for most infections while most don't transmit—is due to the people & what it means. That's all in the article.
It's not just a mathematical curiosity; it has big practical consequences. Also in the article.https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/ …
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Wow. New paper from India, tracing ~500K contacts for ~85,000 cases. They did not find a single positive contact for 70.7% of infected people. Zero! About 5% accounted for 80% of transmission—not in my piece because it's out today! That's overdispersion. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/09/29/science.abd7672.full …pic.twitter.com/w5rdctMu4V
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Look, the science doesn't fit into the lockdown/anti-lockdown fights. It's not how much we restrict, but whether we target the right things. Overdispersion means the right measures take us a long way, but also that we can't relax: It can quickly flip back. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/ …pic.twitter.com/hGe1ug1YVP
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zeynep tufekci Retweeted Justin Fox
See this thread for some great early pieces (some I link to in my piece) explaining the importance of superspreading and overdispersion, and if you want, also take a look at Japan or Hong Kong early epi documents. We're so slow to learn from the evidence.https://twitter.com/foxjust/status/1311352169896071169 …
zeynep tufekci added,
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Also, if you suspect that I went to the trouble of writing ~5000 words on overdispersion so I could type "the mean is not the message", I admit nothing. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/ …pic.twitter.com/0pzV7h2ALa
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zeynep tufekci Retweeted Justin Ling
Described as dense but incredibly interesting=life goal

https://twitter.com/Justin_Ling/status/1311336869968445442 …zeynep tufekci added,
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zeynep tufekci Retweeted Robot Archie 🇪🇺 💙
Then again, the number of people who assume that I just "discovered" skewed distributions or the Pareto principle this month has been pretty impressive, too. Always makes me wonder if men get the article they just wrote explained back to them this much?
https://twitter.com/RobotArchie/status/1311456542047326214 …?zeynep tufekci added,
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Replying to @zeynep
Nope! And I accidentally ran this experiment when a lot of people on here apparently assumed I was a woman. And the atmosphere changed considerably after I posted a photo.
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Replying to @chessninja
I lost count of the people today, all men as far as I can tell, who told me about Pareto, seriously assuming I didn’t know (never mind it’s in the article!
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Replying to @zeynep @chessninja
I’ve been told that 20% of men do 80% of the mansplaining
2 replies 0 retweets 27 likes
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