How about gathering in groups of fewer than 10 people over the festive season?
This is the advice of top international researchers after a study at the US’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) suggested superspreading events have a much larger impact than was previously thought.
This is particularly relevant to SA, with just a few weeks left of the year before the summer holidays, and local epidemiologists have already warned the nation that superspreading events over the festive season could drive us into a crippling second wave.
The researchers at MIT studied 6o superspreading events and applied statistical distributions commonly used in epidemiology.
Based on their findings, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they showed that limiting gatherings to 10 people or less could significantly reduce the number of superspreading events and, thus, the number of infections.
“Superspreading events are more important than most of us had initially realised,” said James Collins, a professor of biological engineering and senior researcher in the study.
Lead author Felix Wong said the significance of the research is in how it informs our behaviour going forward.
“We figured that an analysis that’s rooted in looking at superspreading events and how they happened in the past can inform how we should propose strategies of dealing with and better controlling the outbreak,” he said.
The researchers developed various mathematical models to explore the exponential spread of the disease based on the number of people gathered. They found 10 was the cut-off to keep an event safer from being a superspreader.
“It gives us a handle as to how we could control the ongoing pandemic, which is by identifying strategies that target sup erspreaders,” Wong said. “One way to do that would be to, for instance, prevent anyone from interacting with over 10 people at a large gathering.”
The Tin Roof club in Claremont, Cape Town, made a bad name for itself when matriculants, on the brink of writing their final exams, squashed into the venue for cheap booze and created a superspreading event in doing so.
In the Eastern Cape more recently, at least 26 Walter Sisulu University students from four residences and one staff member tested positive for Covid-19. The outbreak was traced to superspreading events.
Earlier this year, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine mapped the top superspreader events around the world and found that two of the worst cases were in SA in the early days of the pandemic.
The first was the Jerusalem prayer breakfast in Bloemfontein in March, shortly after the country’s first positive case was recorded. It showed that 67 cases were linked to that event.
Shortly thereafter, in early April, 54 people tested positive for Covid-19 after attending the same funeral in Nelson Mandela Bay.
Scientists have warned that we could have a repeat of such events if SA drops its guard over the festive season, which commonly draws intergenerational groups together to celebrate Christmas and the holiday season.
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