Article by Gavin Freeguard: “Covid-19 did not only dominate our lives in April 2020. It also dominated the list of new words entered into the Oxford English Dictionary.
Alongside Covid-19 itself (noun, “An acute respiratory illness in humans caused by a coronavirus”), the vocabulary of the virus included “self-quarantine”, “social distancing”, “infodemic”, “flatten the curve”, “personal protective equipment”, “elbow bump”, “WFH” and much else. But nestled among this pantheon of new pandemic words was a number, one that would shape our conversations, our politics, our lives for the next 18 months like no other: “Basic reproduction number (R0): The average number of cases of an infectious disease arising by transmission from a single infected individual, in a population that has not previously encountered the disease.”
“There have been many important figures in this pandemic,” wrote The Times in January 2021, “but one has come to tower over the rest: the reproduction rate. The R number, as everyone calls it, has been used by the government to justify imposing and lifting lockdowns. Indeed while there are many important numbers — gross domestic product, parliamentary majorities, interest rates — few can compete right now with R” (tinyurl.com/v7j6cth9).
Descriptions of it at the start of the pandemic made R the star of the disaster movie reality we lived through. And it wasn’t just a breakout star of the UK’s coronavirus press conferences; in Germany, (then) Chancellor Angela Merkel made the most of her scientific background to explain the meaning of R and its consequences to the public (tinyurl.com/mva7urw5).
But for others, the “obsession” (Professor Linda Bauld, University of Edinburgh) with “the pandemic’s misunderstood metric” (Nature: tinyurl.com/y3sr6n6m) has been “a distraction”, an “unhelpful focus”; as the University of Edinburgh’s Professor Mark Woolhouse told one parliamentary select committee, “we’ve created a monster”.
How did this epidemiological number come to dominate our discourse? How useful is it? And where does it come from?…(More)”.