COVID-19: India's R value drops to 2.2 between January 7 and 13, shows IIT Madras analysis

New Delhi, Jan 16: India's 'R-value', which indicates how rapidly COVID-19 is spreading, was recorded at 2.2 between January 7 and 13, a drop from the previous two weeks, according to a preliminary analysis by IIT Madras.

The R value of Mumbai was 1.3, Delhi 2.5, Chennai 2.4 and Kolkata 1.6, according to the analysis by IIT Madras' Department of Mathematics and Centre of Excellence for Computational Mathematics and Data Science headed by Prof Neelesh S Upadhye and Prof S Sundar.

It was close to 2.9 nationally from December 25 to December 31 while it was 4 between January 1 and 6. The R value marks the number of people an infected person can spread the disease to. A pandemic is considered to end if this value goes below 1.

Dr Jayant Jha, an assistant professor in the department of mathematics at IIT Madras, said the R value depends on transmissibility probability, contact rate and expected time interval in which infection can happen.

India added 2,71,202 new coronavirus infections to the Covid case tally that reached 3,71,22,164 on Sunday, including 7,743 cases of the Omicron variant. The country saw 1,702 new cases of Omicron variant, the highest in a day so far, and an increase of 28.17 per cent since Saturday.

Experts said it is not possible to undertake genome sequencing of each and every sample, but stressed that this wave is largely being driven by Omicron.