A guide to R — the pandemic’s misunderstood metric

A guide to R — the pandemic’s misunderstood metric

A guide to R — the misunderstood metric

Researchers are worried that politicians might be focusing too much on a single metric when assessing the severity of coronavirus outbreaks. The reproduction number — known as R — is the average number of people each person with a disease goes on to infect. But it is an imprecise estimate that relies on assumptions, and too much attention to it could obscure the importance of other measures, such as trends in numbers of new infections, deaths and hospital admissions. “Epidemiologists are quite keen on downplaying R, but the politicians seem to have embraced it with enthusiasm,” says infectious-disease expert Mark Woolhouse. “We’re concerned that we’ve created a monster.”
Nature | 11 min read