When correcting non-experts for using the wrong metrics, I think it is more important to supply them with the metric that accurately captures their point, rather than just explaining why the original metric they chose was wrong.
This is a good post, and I not only learned from it but was motivated to review the CDC’s more in depth description of R0 as well.
I suspect what your COVID-cautious dance coordinator was trying to express was that in a community dance setting, the amount of social contact is higher than what is built into models of Rt and R0. Neither number will fully characterize the risk of going to a dance, and it’s not just that we’ll be “somewhere in between”—we are just working with a whole different model at that point than was used to generate these figures.
If it was up to me, I might try and communicate about the risk by talking about physical world modeling—“we’ll be in close contact for hours, breathing each others’ air, and there are a lot of older folks who come to community dancing. We keep this dance masked to help blunt the increased risk this poses.” This lets you explain your rationale in a way anybody can understand, without the risk of miscommunicating the science.
When correcting non-experts for using the wrong metrics, I think it is more important to supply them with the metric that accurately captures their point, rather than just explaining why the original metric they chose was wrong.
This is a good post, and I not only learned from it but was motivated to review the CDC’s more in depth description of R0 as well.
I suspect what your COVID-cautious dance coordinator was trying to express was that in a community dance setting, the amount of social contact is higher than what is built into models of Rt and R0. Neither number will fully characterize the risk of going to a dance, and it’s not just that we’ll be “somewhere in between”—we are just working with a whole different model at that point than was used to generate these figures.
If it was up to me, I might try and communicate about the risk by talking about physical world modeling—“we’ll be in close contact for hours, breathing each others’ air, and there are a lot of older folks who come to community dancing. We keep this dance masked to help blunt the increased risk this poses.” This lets you explain your rationale in a way anybody can understand, without the risk of miscommunicating the science.