The Super-Spreader
In the neurosurgery department of a hospital affiliated with Huazhong University of Science and Technology, a single patient became the focal point of what epidemiologists would come to call a 'super-spreader event' . Fourteen medical staff members contracted the virus from this one individual, a pattern that would repeat itself in hospitals, cruise ships, and nursing homes across the globe in the weeks that followed. "Not allowed to speak anything at the beginning of the outbreak," one Wuhan doctor would later recall, describing the initial suppression of information that allowed the pathogen to gain its foothold .