The R-number

Lockdown and the R-number: is Neil Ferguson right? This explains the very similar epidemic curves for all countries in Imperial College’s latest report regardless of interventions, and explains why (as Bristol's Simon Wood points out in an excellent recent paper) you will look in the charts in vain for any convincing evidence that lockdown turned our tide. By tweaking an assumption you can move the peak of my graph forward or back a few days – but you cannot change its general shape. And that general shape, drawn from observed data, poses an utterly different view of Covid than that used as a basis to declare lockdown.