The story of the R number: How an obscure epidemiological figure took over our lives. Part 5: So what did we learn?

Extract

The Times “waved goodbye” to R on 8 March 2021. “You won’t be missed”, wrote science editor, Tom Whipple. He quoted John Edmunds of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine: “The era of R is coming to an end … come the autumn, with luck, all adults will be vaccinated and Covid’s ferocity will have been blunted. And then R can at last return to where it is happiest: mathematical obscurity.”

Even the advent of the Omicron variant in late 2021 failed to drive renewed interest in R. It still featured in the scientific consensus statements. It was still ritually reported as breaking news every Friday, like an artefact from an ancient ceremony that nobody recalls the significance of any more. Perhaps it was less a lack of interest, more a sense of routine – both in the population trying to return to theirs, and R settling into its own of regular scientific reporting.