New Delhi: India’s effective reproduction number or R for Covid, an indicator of how fast an infection is spreading, has decreased to 0.94 this week. It was 0.98 last week.
R describes the average number of people who are likely to catch the infection from a Covid positive person. The value of R should be below 1 for the epidemic to come to an end.
“Among the top 12 states and UTs in terms of current active cases that each have less than 1,000 cases, only Mizoram and Jammu and Kashmir have R much higher than one,” Sitabhra Sinha, a researcher at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, who has been tracking R since the beginning of the pandemic, told ThePrint.
“However, the situation in the cities continues to be bad,” Sinha added.
Mizoram and Jammu Kashmir have seen a decline in their R value over the last two weeks. For Mizoram, R declined to 1.11 this week from 1.14 last week, while for Jammu and Kashmir, it declined to 1.17 this week from 1.23.
In West Bengal, where R was 1.02 last week, it has dropped to around 1 this week.
Telangana, another state which had R above 1 last week — at 1.07 — has seen it decline to 0.96 this week.
Maharashtra and Kerala, both of which had R below 1, saw further decline in the values. For Maharashtra, R went down to 0.86 this week from 0.99, while for Kerala the value dropped to 0.92 from 0.96 last week.
Most other states continue to have R below 1.
Major cities
All major cities, apart from Bengaluru and Delhi, have R above 1.
Chennai’s R increased to 1.06 this week from 1.05 last week. Similarly, Pune’s R increased to 1.13 this week from 1.09 last week.
Both Kolkata and Mumbai have R steady at 1.02.
(Edited by Neha Mahajan)
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