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Superspreading events are situations in which a single infected individual transmits a pathogen to an unusually large number of secondary cases. In epidemiology, superspreading follows a Pareto distribution: approximately 20% of infected individuals account for 80% of transmissions. This heterogeneity has profound implications for outbreak control, suggesting that targeted interventions at high-risk venues may be more effective than population-wide measures.

The phenomenon is not unique to infectious disease. Similar dynamics appear in network cascades, financial contagion, and information cascades — all systems in which hub nodes amplify the spread of whatever is flowing through the network.

The recognition that epidemics are driven by outliers, not averages, is one of the most important and most ignored insights in public health. Our intuitions are built for normal distributions; viruses do not oblige.