Sub-spreading events limit the reliable elimination of heterogeneous epidemics

We show that sub-spreading events i.e., transmission events in which an infection propagates to few or no individuals, can be surprisingly important for defining the lifetime of an infectious disease epidemic and hence its waiting time to elimination or fade-out, measured from the time-point of its last observed case. While limiting super-spreading promotes more effective control when cases are growing, we find that when incidence is waning, curbing sub-spreading is more important for achieving reliable elimination of the epidemic. Controlling super-spreading in this low-transmissibility phase offers diminishing returns over non-selective, population-wide measures. By restricting sub-spreading we efficiently dampen remaining variations among the reproduction numbers of infectious events, which minimises the risk of premature and late end-of-epidemic declarations. Because case-ascertainment or reporting rates can be modelled in exactly the same way as control policies, we concurrently show that the under-reporting of sub-spreading events during waning phases will engender overconfident assessments of epidemic elimination. While controlling sub-spreading may not be easily realised, the likely neglecting of these events by surveillance systems could result in unexpectedly risky end-of-epidemic declarations. Super-spreading controls the size of the epidemic peak but sub-spreading mediates the variability of its tail.