" The significance of the concept, Lloyd-Smith and his coauthors noted, is that if superspreaders exist and can be identified during a disease outbreak, then control measures should be targeted at isolating those individuals, rather than applied more broadly and diffusely across an entire population. Conversely, if you quarantine forty-nine infectious patients but miss one, and that one is a superspreader, your control efforts have failed and you face an epidemic. "

― David Quammen , Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic