Highly contagious coronavirus carriers known as “super spreaders” could make the new outbreak more unpredictable — and tougher to contain — as it fans out across the globe, experts said.

“Super spreaders” are a phenomenon that occurs only with some infectious diseases where patients transmit the illness to a disproportionately high number of people, the Telegraph reported.

With the coronavirus, some individuals might infect one or two people, while a “super spreader” may pass the illness to dozens, the outlet reported.

“It seems to be largely to do with the way an infection proceeds in a specific individual, which means some people simply excrete more virus than others,” Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, told the Telegraph. “So they’re more infectious and become super spreaders.”

“Super spreaders” may prove to be a challenge for health officials trying to stop the spread of the virus, particularly since it is understood that some patients are infecting others before they show symptoms.

Woolhouse added that “if you miss even one case, and that person turns out to be a super spreader, then there’s the potential to spark off another train of transmission.”

“This has big implications for how we try to tackle the coronavirus,” Woolhouse said. “It means we have to be even more vigilant so we detect and isolate cases early — that’s currently the only way to contain and spread the virus.”

Jonathan Ball, professor of virology at the University of Nottingham, said health officials should focus on identifying how the disease spreads between people.

“Of course super spreaders can exacerbate the outbreak,” Ball told the Telegraph. “[But] we need to understand transmission dynamics to see how much different individuals with different symptoms are contributing to the disease.”

Experts previously warned that the mass exodus of residents from Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, has made it “definitely too late” to contain the spread of the virus.

The illness — which has no cure — has so far killed 908 people and infected more than 40,000.