> There is always a slight time lag in the R number of a matter of weeks ah ok: that's not what I understand from how governments are reporting it. My underst

> There is always a slight time lag in the R number of a matter of weeks ah ok: that's not what I understand from how governments are reporting it. My understanding is that it's the (best estimate) of how virus cases are spreading today. Since the graph of cases for today tells you how the virus has spread in the last two weeks, that's not the same information. If you claim that R is only estimated from the historical number of cases, then R is not giving you information that you couldn't technically identify from this graph, I agree. However, R could be estimated using other information.