This seafood merchant was a man named Zhou Zuofeng. He holds the distinction of being the first “superspreader” of the SARS epidemic. A superspreader is a patient who, for one reason or another, directly infects far more people than does the typical infected patient. While R0 (that important variable introduced to disease mathematics by George MacDonald) represents the average number of secondary infections caused by each primary infection at the start of an outbreak, a superspreader is someone who dramatically exceeds the average.
