The diamond princess is a truly terrible place to try to get an estimate for R_0. A cruise ship outbreak is likely to be A) many times more infectious, and B) t

The diamond princess is a truly terrible place to try to get an estimate for R_0. A cruise ship outbreak is likely to be A) many times more infectious, and B) the countermeasures applied are likely to be many times more intense. For instance, the R_0 of covid on the cruise ship was estimated to be around 15 in a paper published less than 2 weeks later. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7107563/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7107563/ Ultimately, a cruise ship is a bad place to look for estimates on R_0 in more broadly applicable contexts, and trying to calculate R_0 so early, when the number of people actually infected is not well known, is a task doomed to failure. Furthermore, I trust big studies with large confidence intervals done by national laboratories https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article, more than I trust studies done by people whose methods section is "we plugged it into R".