But fascination might have turned into unhealthy political and media fixation, say disease experts. R is an imprecise estimate that rests on assumptions, says Jeremy Rossman, a virologist at the University of Kent, UK. It doesn’t capture the current status of an epidemic and can spike up and down when case numbers are low. It is also an average for a population and therefore can hide local variation. Too much attention to it could obscure the importance of other measures, such as trends in numbers of new infections, deaths and hospital admissions, and cohort surveys to see how many people in a population currently have the disease, or have already had it. “Epidemiologists are quite keen on downplaying R, but the politicians seem to have embraced it with enthusiasm,” says Mark Woolhouse, an infectious-diseases expert at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom, who is a member of a modelling group that advises the British government on the pandemic. “We’re concerned that we’ve created a monster. R does not tell us what we need to know to manage this.”
Namely politicians such as the Gov of New Jersey hold this secret number close not revealing its evaluation or the data upon which it rests. Yes, R is meaningless.
One of my more recent analyses of the data showed that the incidence per Sq Mi was highly dependent upon the PoP per Sq mi, the population density. More people more incidence. That is on a county level. Go then to towns and it is even more intense. How finite must we get to control a pandemic?
Do we trust politicians? Most likely not, after all they are politicians and politicians are known for a lot but not truthfulness or intelligence. Do we trust the Scientists, whoever they may be? Again put three Scientists in a room and you will get 9 opinions.
It is interesting to try in all of the papers referenced in the Nature article to find out how to calculate R and even more so what data set to use. Yet massive decisions are "science" based and "numbers" based.
It all just nonsense.
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