R-number

R-number

Subject: Science and Technology

 Context: As states ease the lockdown, opportunities for crowding and for potentially enhanced transmission will increase. R-values are early warning signals

Concept:

• The R-number, a mathematically calculated estimate which measures the number of people who are being infected by an already infected person,.
• 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.
• The national average for the R-value, or reproduction number, one of the parameters of Covid-19 transmission, is 1.32, indicating that one infected person spreads the virus to more than one but less than two people.