New Delhi: India’s R value for Covid-19 has decreased further to 0.89 this week after dipping below 1 last week, with most states with the highest number of active cases also showing a declining trend.
R value or the effective reproduction number is a metric that indicates how quickly an infection is spreading within a population. Essentially, it represents the average number of people who are likely to get the disease from one Covid patient.
R should remain below 1 for active cases to continue declining and for the epidemic to come to an end.
After a brief rise to over 1 two weeks back, the R value in India fell to 0.92 last week. Sitabhra Sinha, a researcher at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences who has been tracking R since the beginning of the pandemic, told ThePrint that this week, the R for India has reduced further to 0.89.
“Kerala, which has the highest number of active cases, now officially has R below 1.” Sinha said.
Since the beginning of July, Kerala’s R had been above 1 but this week, the value fell to 0.93.
Northeastern states
According to Sinha, the Northeastern states seem to have finally come out of the second wave with all eight states registering R values below 1 this week.
In the past several weeks, the R of several states in the Northeast had risen above 1, which drove up India’s overall R.
For example, Nagaland’s R fell to 0.88 from last week’s 1.03. The R value of Assam dropped to 0.84 from last week’s 0.91. Similarly, R for Meghalaya reduced to 0.79 from 0.81 while that of Mizoram fell to 0.78 this week from 0.92 last week.
In Arunachal Pradesh, R was 0.8 last week and reduced to 0.72 this week.
Sikkim, however, saw a slight rise in its R value from 0.8 last week to 0.84 this week. Manipur’s R value also increased from 0.82 to 0.92 this week.
Meanwhile, Himachal Pradesh remains an area of concern with an R above 1. Last week, the state reported the highest R value of over 1.38. This week, the R is closer to one, although Sinha said that he could not get an accurate estimate based on the available data.
Last week, Tamil Nadu’s R value was 1.02, which has declined to 1 this week. All other states with the high active cases counts also have R below 1.
Major cities
Delhi’s R remains the same as last week at 0.85. For Bengaluru, R fell from 0.97 to 0.94 this week.
Chennai’s R was over 1 last week but has now dropped to 0.97. Mumbai’s value has also reduced from 0.91 to 0.7 this week.
However, Kolkata’s R remains over 1 at 1.08 this week. There has also been a slight increase in the R value of Pune, which is close to 1 this week from 0.93 last week.
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