There is a simple, but crucial number at the heart of understanding the threat posed by the coronavirus. It is guiding governments around the world on the actions they need to take to save lives and it gives us clues to the extent that lockdown can be lifted.<\/p>\n
It is called the basic reproduction number or simply the R0 (pronounced R-nought).<\/p>\n
What is an R0?<\/p>\n
The reproduction number is a way of rating a disease’s ability to spread.<\/p>\n
It’s the number of people that one infected person will pass the virus on to, on average, assuming that nobody is immune and people don’t change their behaviour to avoid getting ill.<\/p>\n
Measles has one of the highest numbers in town with a reproduction number of 15. It can cause explosive outbreaks.<\/p>\n
The new coronavirus, known officially as Sars-CoV-2, has a reproduction number of about 3, but estimates vary.<\/p>\n
Why is it important?<\/p>\n
If the reproduction number is higher than one, then the number of cases increases exponentially – it snowballs like debt on an unpaid credit card.<\/p>\n
But if the number is lower than one, the disease will eventually peter out as not enough new people are being infected to sustain the outbreak.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There is a simple, but crucial number at the heart of understanding the threat posed by the coronavirus. It is guiding governments around the world on the actions they need to take to save lives and it gives us clues to the extent that lockdown can be lifted. It is called the basic reproduction number or simply the R0 (pronounced R-nought). What is an R0? The reproduction number is a way of rating a disease’s ability to spread. It’s the number of people that one infected person will pass the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":20131,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30,14],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20130"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20132,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20130\/revisions\/20132"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}