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This seems a bit odd. If it was my job to estimate R₀ for the coronavirus, I'd look at Singapore, Korea, Australia, New Zealand and so on, where there are thousands of patients, and almost all of them know when they caught it and who they caught it from. Why would you choose to study a place where people don't know those things?

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Because that is the definition of R0. Once people are aware and change their behavior R changes as well and is not readily translatable to a different setting.

So you want to measure transmission rates under normal interactions, not during shelter in place/everyone wearing masks?

Yes.

From the article:

Dr Feigl-Ding explains that R0 is the “R reproductive number at time 0 before countermeasures”.

He points out that this is not the R(effective) at current time under mitigation measures such as distancing and testing, tracing and quarantine, which are expected to slash chains of transmission.

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