The Department of Health has published the current Covid-19 reproduction number.
The current estimate of R is 0.3 – 0.8. R does not have a fixed value but varies with time and is likely to be different each day.
R is the number of individuals who, on average, will be infected by a single person with the infection. However when community transmission of the virus is very low, R is no longer the most important number for the purposes of policy decisions.
As the number of new cases is sufficiently low and in the presence of a robust testing programme and test/trace/protect strategy the number of positive tests per day is likely to be a more important parameter in the context of planning.
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