Flavinkins (@Flavinkins)

“ All I’m saying is that, for the sizes of the A and B polytomies to be highly informative, I’d think one would need to make strong assumptions that suppress potential fluctuations in R0. So I don’t view this argument being very strong. I’m flying on intuition here, though.”@jbkinney “It would, and similar topologies exist (fig. below from Rambaut et al. 2020). But this is likely a moot point, as many other problematic assumptions affect the epidemic simulations and phylogenetic structures proposed by Pekar et al.”@AntGDuarte And the earliest transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is characterized by outbreak after outbreak—the majority of sampled cases came from superspreader events. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9128337/ The R0 of SARS-CoV-2 especially early on is extremely inhomogeneous—the location where an infected person becomes infectious, and the number of social contacts that happened within the infectious period, directly determines the R0. For home clusters the R0 is usually <3, where the endpoint of the transmission stops within the household (household interactions does not expand past the family itself in most households), whereas for superspreading events in crowded places the R0 could be anywhere from 40 to 100, even higher in some extreme cases like concerts, banquets or public transports. More recent examples: 2 superspreading events of Omicron BA.1 and BA.2. Cluster cases were once again substantially divergent from the rest of the world. The same topology is also observed in other, earlier superspreading clusters of Omicron BA.2.