In the past few days, the term reproductive number has been one of the most used words in the crisis surrounding the highly contagious corona virus. The number of reproductions hides the number of new infections that every patient infected with the coronavirus causes on average. The lower the number of reproductions, the less the virus spreads. Today the RKI had good news for the German citizens again, because the number of reproductions has dropped again.
Despite the easing that the federal and state governments had decided in the past few days, the virus infection rate in Germany has dropped below the critical value of one again. This was confirmed by the RKI on Tuesday and in its current management report states the number of reproductions at 0.94 (previous day: 1.07). Statistically speaking, each patient infected with the coronavirus now infects fewer than 1 other person. “We are not yet anticipating a further upward trend,” says the current RKI report. So the decided easing does not seem to result in a new increase in the number of infections. The weakening of the decline in the number of infections in recent days is also related to local clustering. However, since the total number of infections in Germany decreases sharply overall, these local clusters of course influence the reproductive numbers much more than would be the case with higher numbers of cases.
In the next few days, the development should now be closely monitored to ensure that the decline in the number of reproductions is also permanent.
