Lorenzo Pellis, Paul J Birrell, Joshua Blake, Christopher E Overton, Francesca Scarabel, Helena B Stage, Ellen Brooks-Pollock, Leon Danon, Ian Hall, Thomas A House, Matt J Keeling, Jonathan M Read, Daniela De Angelis
The reproduction number <mml:math xmlns:mml="https://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mi>R</mml:mi></mml:mrow> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> has been a central metric of the COVID-19 pandemic response, published weekly by the UK government and regularly reported in the media. Here, we provide a formal definition and discuss the advantages and most common misconceptions around this quantity. We consider the intuition behind different formulations of <mml:math xmlns:mml="https://www...
November 2022: Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A, (Statistics in Society)