Headlines

  1. Boris Johnson is expected to tell the British public that the R rate will be a crucial yardstick of whether to lift, or reinstate, restrictions in the coming weeks.

  2. The WHO estimate that the R0 (R Nought) for COVID-19 is netween 2 and 2.5. This means that on average, each infected person infects about 2 people. At this rate, the pandemic will grow.

  3. Rt is the R0 with restrictions. If and when this rate is and remains less than 1, an epidemic will be more easily controlable.

  4. May 28, 2020: Coronavirus reproduction rate below one in most of France. (Rt?)

  5. June 22, 2020: Children up to age 15 are required to retrun to school.

  6. Here are the key questions.

  1. How can we tell if and when we are winning the battle?

  2. In the 14th century, the scholarly explanations of the origin and control of the “Great Pestilence” were found among miasma, religion and astrology.

  3. Can we do any better with our modern soothsayers/tea-leaf readers? We certainly hope so. After all we are in the 21st centry and governmental decisions are mostly data driven, right?

  4. To try to answer this question let’s look at the data (of which there is an abundance) and try to separate some credible signal from the noise.

This is encouraging. The case growth curve is transitioning from an exponential to a sigmoid shape.

PAHO

Click Here“PAHO Rt Shiny app”

What happened on March 12? Were there really 26,849 new cases in one day?

Let’s see what results I get using the R package “EpiEstim”

En guise de conclusion pour Emmanuel Macron

Félicitations, monsieur le Président!

Pour le moment, la valeur de l’indice Rt soutient votre décision de rouvrir la nation.

Vive la France!