R-value

Subject – Science and Tech

Context – R-value over 1 in big cities, likely start of third wave

Concept –

The reproduction number or R is an indicator of how quickly a disease is spreading in the population.
An R-value of 1, which signifies that every infected person is passing on the infection to at least one person on an average, is a key threshold after which cases begin to rise rapidly.
The R-naught, or R0, is a virus’s basic reproductive number — an epidemiologic metric used to describe the contagiousness of infectious agents.
At its simplest, the basic reproductive number can show us how worried we should be about infection
If the R0 is above one, each case is expected to infect at least one other person on average, and the virus is likely to keep spreading.
If it’s less than one, a group of infected people are less likely to spread the infection.