Delhi's R-Value crosses 2 this week, shows IIT-Madras study - has fourth wave of Covid started?

Amid spike in COVID-19 cases in Delhi, an analysis by IIT-Madras states that R-value, which indicates the spread of COVID-19, was recorded at 2.1 in Delhi this week, according to India.com report.

As per the 2.1 R-value, every infected person is infecting two others in the national capital.

The ‘R’ or reproductive value indicates the number of people an infected person can spread the disease to, and a pandemic is considered to end if this value goes below one.

The preliminary analysis by computational modelling was done 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. India’s R-value, at present, stands at 1.3, the analysis found.

When asked if it is the beginning of fourth wave, 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,” he said.

For other metro cities — Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, Jha said the number of cases are too low to ascertain a trend.

Meanwhile, Delhi logged 1,042 fresh Covid cases with a positivity rate of 4.64 per cent while two persons died due to the infection, according to data shared by the city health department on Friday.

With the national capital seeing a spurt in COVID-19 cases in the past few days, the number of active cases has increased to 3,253 from 601 on April 11.