The R number

[Noextremes2017]

A few weeks ago we were all told this was the most important measure. Can’t recall reading about it much lately?

This seems pretty official...

www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/now-casting/

Once cases are low it’s much less relevant.
If one week you have 2 cases in a county, then 4 cases the next that’s an R rate of 2.0 which we have all been led to believe is very, very bad.
Conversely if you have 100 cases one week, then 50 the next that’s an R rate of 0.5 which is apparently very very good.
Trouble is, you are massively more at risk from the 150 people than you would be from the 6! So it’s meaningless

It's not meaningless, but it has to be taken in conjunction with the overall number of cases.

So because the overall number of cases is now so LOW it is effectively meaningless.

@sunandrose

I was not referring to academic reports. I meant there has been precious little mention of it by politicians and their paid NHS ‘advisors’. Whereas they used to bang on about it every day......

England's cases are not that low, they are higher than rest of Europe by a good way.

I read yesterday it was up to 1.3 in London?

I can't for the life of me find where I read it though, so it may be nonsense. I do think it should still be published given how much they banged on about it.

Clarity and consistency of information would help us all.

I think it suits the agenda to ignore that it's creeping above one again

If there is one thing that has been demonstrated throughout this pandemic, it is the important to gather news from a variety of sources and not rely on whatever tale any individual government is peddling.