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.
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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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