Forecasting cases & effective reproduction number
#18 - We use a statistical model to predict cases for your district.
Our strategy for District Magistrates in India: COVID-19 is a war only Districts can fight.
Is R0 the correct quantity to assess the risk?
The basic reproduction number (R0) is the number of secondary infections caused by a single infected individual. If R0 is greater than one, it spreads very quickly. If it is less than one, the epidemic disappears in time.
The issue with R0 is that it does not factor in the properties and behaviour of the population in which the disease is spreading. To solve this issue, we use the effective reproduction number - Rt.
What is Rt?
Rt is the effective reproduction number. It is the number of people an infected person is expected to infect, given the current situation.
The transmission rate of the infection depends on a number of factors like - social distancing behaviours, average population density, number of vectors in the population and inter-zone mobility.
Therefore it is important to quantify the spreading potential of the virus at a granular level. We compute Rt locally for each district. We do this because not all districts are alike. One district's outbreak can be very different from that of another.
We have developed a statistical model for you to forecast the number of cases in your district!
You can visit the district dashboard to find the Rt of your district.
Click on your district, the Rt value will be displayed in the panel on the bottom right.
We can estimate Rt as a function of how many new cases appear each day. The relationship between the number of cases within the last 7 days and the number of cases today give us an estimate of Rt. For districts with very less number of cases, we can not estimate Rt, since enough data is not available.
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