REPRODUCTIVE RATE

R0, or “R Naught,” measures the contagious nature of an infectious disease. It is also called the basic reproduction number, which denotes the number of people likely to catch the disease from one infected person. In other words, it is the number of cases directly generated by every case of an infectious disease where the entire population is susceptible because of the non-availability of a vaccine. Globally, scientists estimate the R0 of Covid-19 is in a range of 2 to 3. But in India, the number appears to be somewhere between 1.5 and 2.