-
Adviser sticks afinger in the air, makes a guess. Government then ignore any of the advice that number indicates ought to happen.
-
It's mainly based on number of cases and duration of contagious period, both of which must be known reasonably well, or at least to some degree of uncertainty
If an individual, after getting infected, infects exactly R new individuals only after exactly a time τ (the serial interval) has passed, then the number of infectious individuals over time grows as
n(t) = n(0) R ^ (t/τ)
from Wikipedia. (obviously prevalence of anti-bodies and all that shite goes into a more complex model)
They won't give uncertainties or confidence intervals or whatever 'cause no one knows what they are. Complete speculation but I would guess that "0.7-0.9" actually means something like 0.8±0.1.
Same thing as that stupid alert level, they don't want to give out the proper maths because it's more likely to confuse than clarify
You are reading a single comment by @mashton and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
dancing james
frankenbike
@mashton
Does anyone know how "R" is measured?
It seems like an odd thing to present as a factual figure. It must be statisticaly derived from more directly measurable things?