[deveac]

It feels like all of the reporting I've seen from experts (not just mainstream news outlets which are admittedly terrible)has indicated Covid-19's R0 is worse than influenza.

It would have been awfully nice if The WHO tossed us a citation on their claim that this is not the case. It was hard to read the entire piece with that unsupported claim hanging so heavily.

And the containment claim...again...would have loved for them to argue the case, because it is exceedingly easy to argue against the case.

[knzhou]

Unfortunately R0 is a bit of a vague thing.

For seasonal flu, you could think of it as being very low, because most people already have immunity. It's already endemic, so there isn't room for exponential growth.

For a new flu (like the 2008 swine flu) it is extremely high, which is why people barely did anything to contain it back then -- it was just impossible.

What we have right now is in between.

[usaar333]

Isn't R0 by definition for a population that isn't immunitized?

[cm2187]

The problem is that “worse” can mean anything. It can be marginally worse without being a serious cause of concern or it can be really really bad.

That’s the beauty of journalism: being flexible with the truth. You can print end of the world headlines with the clean conscience that since it is technically worse, you are not pushing fake news. But that may still be a massively over exaggerated and misleading headline.

And I think that is what happening. I don’t see many people claiming it is no worse than the flu. I see people claiming it is marginally worse than the flu.

[ianburrell]

R0 is not the only factor in the spread of the disease. R0 is measure of how contagious a disease is, the average number of infections from each case. But other factors matter for the spread and for possibility of containment. For example, the incubation period matters for how fast it spreads, and asymptomatic transmission matters for can be contained.

"With influenza, people who are infected but not yet sick are major drivers of transmission, which does not appear to be the case for COVID-19."

It sounds like the big difference is that most of spread from COVID-19 is when people are sick. With lots of testing, can detect who is sick and isolate them. It also sounds like most of the spread is with close contacts and unlike flu, it is possible to map contacts and isolate them.