The coronavirus has traveled the globe, infecting one person at a time.

Some sick people might not spread the virus much further, but some people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 are what epidemiologists call “superspreaders.”.

Early in the outbreak, researchers estimated that a person carrying SARS-CoV-2.

That qualifies him as a super spreader: someone who is responsible for infecting an especially large number of other people.

In South Korea, around 40 people who attended a single church service were infected at the same time.

In Chicago, before social distancing was in place, one person that attended a dinner, a funeral and then a birthday party was responsible for 15 new infections.

Additionally, asymptomatic individuals – up to 50% of all those who get COVID-19 – will continue their normal activities, inadvertently infecting more people.

An infected shopkeeper might come in contact with a large number of people and goods each day.

A sick health care worker might come in contact with large numbers of people who are especially susceptible, given the presence of other underlying illnesses.

In the process, they identified multiple situations where a single person was responsible for as many as six or eight new infections.

The researchers estimated that only 20% of all those infected with SARS-CoV-2 were responsible for 80% of all local transmission.

These scientists estimated that 80% of community transmission events – one person spreading the coronavirus to another – could be tracked back to just 1-10% of sick individuals.

And when another research group modeled the variation in how many other SARS-CoV-2 infections a single infected person tends to cause, they also found there were occasionally individuals who were very infectious.

The most famous is Typhoid Mary, who in the early 20th century purportedly infected 51 people with typhoid through the food she prepared as a cook.

For both SARS and MERS, superspreading mainly occurred in hospitals, with scores of people being infected at a time.