zico wrote:Itsallaguess wrote:
Just on that particular point regarding the idea of granular R-values though - doesn't it make a lot of sense to factor those three major areas separately in terms of then being able to compose and prescribe 'Covid-19 management-techniques' differently for each area?
I see your point, but it's important to remember R-values are just another way of describing the growth rate in simple terms (so people don't get confused by negative growth rates) so having 3 different ones defeats the point really. As Jenny Harries said, the scale and spread of an epidemic are more important. If we have 3,000 cases per day and an expected increase of 10% per week, in the short-term, that's a lot better than 300,000 cases per day increasing by 1% per week.
If we didn't have R-values, we'd be talking about number of cases and growth rates.
But that was sort of my point.
Take a hypothetical situation where there are zero new cases in the general community, and it was shown that all new cases were being seen in hospitals and care-homes...
Given the ability to perform much more stringent virus-management protocols within the hospital and care-home communities, then in that hypothetical situation, wouldn't it be more and more difficult to continue to justify highly-stringent lock-down protocols in the general community?
That was the point I was trying to make - that a 'single' R-value discussion that has recently shown it to be a slightly rising number, at the same time as being told that we can walk-down the more stringent community lock-down protocols seem, on the face of it, to be a confusing message to those of us that are interested in the wider picture.
But I was asking if there was the possibility that the wider data behind that 'single R-value' might actually show a 'rapidly improving' situation in the general community, with some legacy issues in the other two areas, which 'might' go some way to explain that confusing 'rising R-number & lowering lock-down protocols' situation?
Cheers,
Itsallaguess