In today's presentation by the Governor he was questioned about where his R values came from. How eere they calculated etc. His answer was the utmost in obfuscation. namely he never even tried to answer and worse I suspect he has no clue.
Now NJ Spotlight had a piece on this issues. They state:
Gov. Phil Murphy loves to highlight the state’s use of data in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and last week he unveiled a new favorite statistic: the reproduction rate, or Rt. “It’s a gauge of how fast contagions spread and with a virus like COVID-19, knowing that Rt is vital,” Murphy said at his daily media briefing last Tuesday, pointing to a new chart that showed the rate’s downward trend over the past three months. “Flattening this curve has been just as important as flattening the curve of the overall numbers of new cases, which we’ve shown you for now many weeks.”
Ok, I get it. But frankly one cannot get it from any data presented. It is a theoretical construct that yields a theoretical result. To actually measure it one must have extensive tracking mechanisms in place with extensive testing. Sorry Gov, you do not have this. Bad Science, no, bad politics.
I would refer the folks in Trenton to say Murray, Mathematical Biology, Springer (1989) pp 610-647, as a good explanation. Been there done that.
It is impossible without doing a controlled set of experiments to come up with this number. This is just another example of the Three Card Monty schemes of politicians.
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