A guide to R — the pandemic’s misunderstood metric
▻https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02009-w
An important aspect of Rt is that it represents only an average across a region. This average can miss regional clusters of infection. Conversely, high incidences of infection among a spatially distinct smaller subsection of a population can sway a larger region’s Rt value. For instance, Germany’s national Rt value jumped from just over 1 to 2.88 in late June (later revised down to 2.17) largely because of an outbreak in a meat-processing plant at Gütersloh in North Rhine-Westphalia (see ’Germany’s Regional Outbreaks’). The Robert Koch Institute noted that national infections overall were still low, which is why the local outbreak had such an effect on the country’s Rt, which had dropped below 1 again by the end of June. This makes it unlikely that Rt would be used to steer local lockdown policy in Germany, Schaade says. “If the rolling mean of R was at 1.2 for a few weeks, then that would show there was a problem that needed attention, even if case numbers were low.” But in practice, researchers find out about local outbreaks before that because of a reported spike in cases, not because of changes to Rt. Germany has ongoing surveillance and public reporting of transmission levels in 400 counties.