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  • NEWS FEATURE

A guide to R — the pandemic’s misunderstood metric

What the reproduction number can and can’t tell us about managing COVID-19.
  1. David Adam

    1. David Adam is a science journalist based in London.

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Cartoon of Boris Johnson presenting a colourful dial with a needle pointing to ‘1’ showing the R value.

Illustration by David Parkins

Mathematicians and public-health experts watched through their fingers in May as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson unveiled a series of charts to explain how the government would guide Britain out of coronavirus lockdown. Perhaps most prominent was a colourful dial with a needle hovering near a single digit: 1.

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Nature 583, 346-348 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02009-w

References

  1. Kucharski, A. J. et al. Lancet 20, 553–558 (2020).

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  3. Caicedo-Ochoa, Y. et al. Int. J. Infect. Dis. 95, 316–318 (2020).

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