History shows that fewer hours worked does not mean lower productivity In 2019 Microsoft Japan reported that cutting the working week to four days improved productivity by 40%. The gains came partly from cost reductions. Less electricity was used and fewer documents were printed. The shorter week also demanded other, newer efficiencies. For example, meetings were reduced in length and the maximum number of participants was capped. I’ve noticed something similar in video conference calls.

Herd immunity occurs when enough of the population, by one means or another, are immune to a disease, such that chains of infection are unlikely to occur. Acquiring that immunity can be via a vaccine, or through immunity acquired by an earlier infection. We can define herd immunity in terms of R, the reproduction number, which is the number of people an individual infects in a population. This comes in two flavours:

COVID-19 data for the UK has been provided in an up to date and tidy form by Tom White and others. I’ve used this source to see how easy it is to plot this data on a map. Plotting 🔗This data set makes it very easy to plot case, test and death counts. We can grab it and put it into a data frame like so: caseData <- read.csv("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tomwhite/covid-19-uk-data/master/data/covid-19-cases-uk.csv") %>% mutate(Date = as.