God bless Professor Tim Spector for all that he has done over the past 8 months, the Covid Symptom study app has done an amazing job and probably saved many lives with the discoveries made.
An average R rate of 0.9 does not mean at no point are we out of the woods when we have in excess of 20,000 New cases a day.
Infections are still happening and it's a hell of a lot of people who are infectious at any one time, probably in excess of 100,000 (estimating a person is infectious for a week, some are more infectious having greater viral loads, others isolate early on, etc).
100,000 who then spread it to 0.9 People, so next week it's around 90,000, the following week 81,000...
Note - This rough estimate is based on the time people are infectious for and not the number of people who physically have the virus, which will be far higher as the virus can last upto several weeks although you are not contagious for that entire period.
With that in mind, it's still going to take a long time to get the number of active cases to something reasonable and controllable.
Yes, getting below 1 is good, it means numbers will start to decline slowly but it needs to be viewed in perspective.
Maybe it would be better to focus on a R rate of 0.5 as a supposed goal as that would mean a halving of rates and far more sustainable to control an increase as overall, the total will still be declining.
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