Talking out of their Rs

The R number is the amount of infectability at a given point.

The reproduction number (R) is the average number of secondary infections produced by 1 infected person.

And then there is the COVID Alert Status: it goes from 1 to five, where 1 is not known to be present and 5 is where there is a material risk of the NHS being overwhelmed.

To move from say 4 to 3, certain things have to be present, and the R rate has to be within certain limits.

Sadly, the Government has been playing free and lose with what should and shouldn't be allowed when the alert status is still at 4 in the UK, 9 days after Johnson said it would be dropping to 3.

If this is the case, why is lockdown being loosened when the R number doesn't back this up, and in most regions the R number is nearly at 1, meaning it should be at 4. In the North West the R number almost certainly above 1, and on London it increased from 0.4 to 0.95.

Last night Matt Hancock made all sorts of new restrictions on the wearing masks on public transport an in hospitals, the latter without discussions with NHS chiefs, so the announcement at 17:00 on a Friday evening was something of a "surprise". Almost like they're making it up as they go along!

Well.