New Delhi: The national capital recorded an R-value of 2.1 indicating that every infected person is further infecting two other people, as per an analysis by Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, reported news agency PTI.
The ‘R’ represents Reproductive value which indicates the number of people an infected individual can spread the infection to, and a pandemic is considered to end if the R-value goes down below 1.
IIT Madras’ Department of Mathematics and Centre of Excellence for Computational Mathematics and Data Science headed by Professor Neelesh S Upadhye and Professor S Sundar conducted the preliminary analysis by computational modelling.
As per the same, Delhi’s R-value for this week was calculated at 2.1 while at the national level the R-value was 1.3, reported the news agency.
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Responding to the question whether this was the onset of the fourth wave of Covid-19 in Delhi, Dr Jayant Jha, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, IIT-Madras, said it would be too early to declare an onset of another wave.
“We can only say right now that every person is affecting two others….but we need to wait a bit to declare onset…we don’t know about the immunity status and whether the people who got affected during the third wave in January are getting affected or not again,” said the professor, quoted by PTI.
For other metro cities — Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, Jha said the number of cases are too low to ascertain a trend.
Delhi is witnessing a surge in the cases of Covid-19 as the city reported 1,042 fresh cases of Covid-19 on Friday taking the cumulative number to 18,72,699. Whereas 2,527 new cases of Covid-19 were logged in India on Saturday with 1,656 recoveries and 33 deaths in the last 24 hours.