A key measure of how quickly coronavirus is spreading across the country has fallen to 1, according to the latest data.
In mid-September, this number climbed to 1.8. “This is good news, but these are weekend values that are affected by the number of tests”, the director of the Institute of Health Information and Statistics of the Czech Republic (IHIS) Ladislav Dušek said.
“According to our data, the number R is actually between 1 and 1.1,” added Dušek. “The value of 1 is currently very high. If it is confirmed in the following days, we have to keep strict restrictions.”
Despite this decrease, the percentage of positive people remains very high – around thirty percent.
Read: Czech COVID-19 Hospitalizations Drop for First Time in 2 Weeks
The Czech Republic reported 6,542 new COVID-19 cases on Sunday with a total of 341,644 COVID-19 cases since the pandemic started in March. There are 180,797 active cases currently.
Deaths have climbed by 178 to 3,429. The number of hospitalizations has dropped to 7,370, while the number of those in intensive care increased to 1,156.
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What is R?
The reproduction number is a way of rating coronavirus or any disease’s ability to spread. It’s the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to, on average.
If the reproduction number is higher than one, then the number of cases increases exponentially – it snowballs like debt on an unpaid credit card.
But if the number is lower the disease will eventually stop spreading, as not enough new people are being infected to sustain the outbreak.
