Early in the COVID pandemic, there was much discussion of super-spreaders — a single individual attending a routine and harmless event such as a birthday party, church service, or dinner party who caused many other people to become infected. As the pandemic has evolved and started significantly infecting young adults, we have become more focused on mass-gathering places such as bars and beaches.
Both super-spreaders and places for mass gatherings share something in common: multiple individuals coming into contact with multiple other individuals in a relatively short period of time. This type of mixing pattern is termed “concurrency” and has been used to explain how many infectious diseases such as HIV spread through a community. A correlate of this model is that in settings where individuals have high levels of concurrency, there is the opportunity for them to infect more than one person, causing exponential growth in the infection (e.g., an outbreak). In contrast, without concurrency, one person may not infect anyone else and the spread slows.
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