On Thursday of each week, the Department of Health, will now publish the current COVID-19 reproduction number, the ‘R’ value.
The current estimate of R is 0.7 – 0.9 enabling the Executive decision today to ease some restrictions.
Explain the importance of the ‘R’ value and what it represents, the Department of Health have said:
“It is important to model the COVID-19 epidemic in Northern Ireland in order to plan the delivery of Health and Social Care services and to inform decision making with regard to social distancing and other restrictions.
“Central to this modelling is estimating the Reproduction Number (R). R is the number of individuals who, on average, will be infected by a single person with the infection. R does not have a fixed value and varies with time. It is likely to be different every day.
“There are different ways of calculating R and a number of different values for R each day are produced. That is why the number is being published in the form of banding.
“When R is above 1, the transmission of the epidemic will increase, resulting in more cases, hospital admissions and deaths. The greater the value of R above 1, the more rapid the increase. When R is below 1, there will be a fall in the number of cases, hospital admissions and deaths. The further R is below 1, the more rapid the fall will be.
“The Executive has indicated that keeping R below 1 is a key objective as we move forward in the epidemic.”
