3 ms·
It remains a valuable descriptive statistic for the population as a whole. Your own model might do all sorts of clever stuff under the hood, but its prediction
by alimw 6y ago
It remains a valuable descriptive statistic for the population as a whole. Your own model might do all sorts of clever stuff under the hood, but its prediction will be expressible to first order in terms of R₀ and that's what people are going to be interested in.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoIt's a valuable descriptive statistic, but it's very prone to misinterpretation. I've seen a lot of people follow sites like rt.live, where they claim to produce "up-to-date-values for R" and draw (their arbitrary estimate of) R=1 as the dividing line between good and bad. So I'm not sure it ends up as a net positive to the public's understanding of the virus.