India’s Covid R Value Falls To 0.90

  • 24-Jan-2021
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The effective reproduction number (R) — an indicator of how fast an infection spreads in a population — for Covid-19 in India has decreased slightly to 0.90 from 0.92 last week.

For three weeks now, the R value had remained between 0.90 and 0.92. R must be sustained under 1 for an epidemic to come to an end.

Sitabhra Sinha, a researcher at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, calculated the R values for India and the states with the highest number of active cases.

“Kerala, the no. 1 state currently in terms of active cases, is the only one among the top 16 that has an R value higher than 1. So it looks like the state will continue to hold the top spot next week also,” Sinha told. 

Barring the first week of January, Kerala’s R value had remained over 1 since 15 December due to a surge in the number of cases. This week, however, the state saw a slight decline in the R value from 1.06 to 1.03. 

Over 38 per cent of all active cases in the country are from Kerala. As of Saturday, the state has 70,624 active cases of Covid-19, the highest in the country. 

Apart from Kerala, in four of the five states with the highest active caseload, the R values dipped since last week. These four states are Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh. 

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