“It was when Matt Hancock used the term ‘reproduction number’ for the 15th time in his latest press conference that I stopped counting. R, as this concept is also known, has become the government’s new totem, the driver of policy, the means of calibrating our response to the dangers of COVID-19….  As a concept, it is certainly seductive. R, as everyone now knows, refers to the average number of people that one infected person will transmit the virus to,” Matthew Sayed writes in The Times. But “R is, after all, an average for the entire UK. As a single point estimate, it doesn’t take into account the marked regional differences in transmission. It takes no account of the variance between different settings, such as care homes and factories. It takes no account of the fact that the spread of the virus isn’t the same for each person but is shaped to a significant degree by superspreading events. Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist and the author of The Rules of Contagion, estimates that 80% of transmission occurs via as little as 10% of the population.In other words, the R number for the majority of us is, in fact, zero.”