A way to assess how quickly the novel coronavirus is replicating is the effective reproduction number, or simply Rt – a way of rating a disease’s ability to spread. It is the number of people that one infected person will pass the virus on to, on average.
If Rt is above 1, infection numbers will rise rapidly. If Rt is below 1, then the disease will eventually die out.
Some diseases, like measles, spread very quickly – it has a reproduction number of 15 in populations without immunity. The new coronavirus, known officially as Sars-CoV-2, has a reproduction number of about three, but estimates vary.
This is why nations have imposed lockdowns around the world: to lower the Rt so that eventually the outbreak of disease subsides. In Ukraine, one can see that Rt dropped abruptly after a strict lockdown was introduced in March, but started growing again as it was lifted in June.
The Ukrainian website texty.org.ua has made a model of Rt for Ukrainian oblasts based on data by Ukraine’s National Health Service. The input data are the number of tests and the number of new cases in each oblast. The model from the website rt.live was used in Texty’s calculations.
We have built a wiz based on their calculations below. You can also visit Texty’s Ukrainian page for more graphs.
