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Is India Winning the COVID war? The ‘R’ factor goes below 1; here is what it means?

The ‘R’, or the Reproduction Rate, measures how infectious the coronavirus is – put simply, it is a measure of how many people are infected by one infected person.

The total active cases are 6,80,680 after a decrease of 14,829 in the last 24 hours while the total cured cases are 70,16,046 with 67,549 new discharges in the last 24 hours.

New Delhi: The ‘R’, or the Reproduction Rat are an estimate of the number of people one patient can infect. The ‘R’ changes with time, and takes into account that some individuals are protected from the disease — either because they have developed immunity or because of social distancing and other measures. If ‘R’ is 2.0, it indicates that one person who is infected with COVID-19 will on average infect another two people.

India has recorded the steepest surges in the COVID-19 pandemic. As cases continue to surge across regions, here comes the good news. Experts have found out that the virus’s ‘R’ factor went below 1, for the first time since the pandemic started to spread in India.

For India, R was calculated to be about 1.83 in April.

ICMR Senior scientist Nivedita Gupta said,

The R-value went up to 1.19 on 7 July from 1.11 around 26 June, just a week since ‘Unlock 2’ kicked in.

According to scientists and researchers, most hit states have witnessed a drop of the R-value in recent weeks and if this trend continues, we might be nearing the end of the deadly pandemic in the coming months.

Delhi which is in the middle of a second wave is seeing the R-value hover just a little around one while states like Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra have registered a rate of 0.90.

An epidemic is arrested when the R-value consistently remains below 1. However, without continued precautions, it can increase again.

Corona test

How it is calculated?

‘R’ is a product of three factors — the probability of infection when a susceptible person comes in contact with an infected individual, the average rate of contact between susceptible and infected individuals and the duration during which an individual spreads the infection.

It is calculated through mathematical epidemiological models that compute how fast the virus spreads through the population.

Why is this so important to track?

R number could signify how good or bad a given region is doing in the fight against coronavirus. It could also indicate the states where COVID-19 is seeing exponential growth and the ones which could be doing good.