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What's happened with the new variant btw? Cos I think "70% more transmissible" or anything like is now pretty unsustainable as a claim given that London hit R<1 about 10 days ago according to my reading of the Zoe data.
I saw the PHE secondary attack rates suggesting ~35% more transmissible but even this seems pretty high from my back-of-mental-envelope analysis.
Okay, partly I'm being disingenuous here in the first tweet. As I say, PHE revised those first estimates down. But this was the initial official reporting of it, which states "95% CI: 67-75%" & didn't really give any further indication of how to interpret this credible interval.
Most journos don't know what confidence intervals are, but to a first approximation absolutely none of them know what credible intervals are. If you're trying to provide official estimates for public consumption then I think there's a responsibility here!
And let's be honest, these downward revisions have received precisely no coverage whatsoever.
Further, IIRC, I think it's interesting to note that the response from the Epi Big Boy community to those asking for the initial evidence was best described as "lots of pissy subtweets".
Anyway. Somewhere along the line a consensus has been reached - not just in govt but in public discourse more broadly - that it is always legitimate to provide and publicise more pessimistic estimates and much less so when those estimates are less worrying.
And fine, the fact that risks are asymmetric and growth is multiplicative means that there is a case for not being wrong on the more optimistic side, but also 1) that does not mean that there are no downside risks on this and 2) *even much more so than this*...
We live in what is notionally a liberal democracy and incredibly important decisions about the issue du jour which pervades all of our daily lives are being made in this context. I think we could do with a bit of treating people like adults, really.
I see that the latest MRC estimates have London & the SE with comfortably the lowest current estimates of R in the country.
If the new variant had not hit then the R number in London could have been as low as [squints at smudged notes] minus 0.1.
![If the new variant had not hit then the R number in London could have been as low as [squints at smudged notes] minus 0.1.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ErxQkjWW4AA5FbF.png "If the new variant had not hit then the R number in London could have been as low as [squints at smudged notes] minus 0.1.")
