One statistical analysis must not rule them all

Abstract

Brief summary: This Nature comment was prompted by the very wide range of calculated values for the COVID-19 infections ‘reproduction number’ R, produced by different modelling teams despite access to the same datasets on UK’s emerging ‘2nd wave’ in October 2020. Values of R ranged from 115 new infected individuals (infected from 100 individuals infected at baseline) with a lower confidence limit of 96 (i.e. slightly declining infections) to 166 with an upper limit of 182 (i.e. almost doubling). They argue that no one answer is correct, rather the range of values indicates true uncertainty in the data.