UPSC Articles
R-naught
Part of: GS Prelims and GS-II- Health
In News:
- The R-naught, or R0, is a virus’s basic reproductive number — an epidemiologic metric used to describe the contagiousness of infectious agents.
- At its simplest, the basic reproductive number can show us how worried we should be about infection
- If the R0 is above one, each case is expected to infect at least one other person on average, and the virus is likely to keep spreading.
- If it’s less than one, a group of infected people are less likely to spread the infection.