While the outbreak in the factory has been severe, authorities hope the virus has not been able to spread further. “It would be far worse if you’d have 50,000 daily cases and an estimated R of around 2-3.” “If you have low infection numbers in total – in Germany some hundreds per day – and some larger outbreaks, R can rise quite quickly, but this is not that problematic,” she said. “R must always be seen in context,” said Marieke Degen, the deputy press officer at the Robert Koch Institute. The rate in Germany jumped suddenly because 1,553 workers at the Toennies factory tested positive for the virus, even as the rest of the country saw very few new infections. She suggested that new restrictions might need to be put in place if the rate goes up.īut while the R number is important, it doesn’t paint a complete picture. That means some patients will end up missing out on the critical care they need – for example because there aren’t enough ventilators – and the overall death toll is therefore much higher.Ĭhancellor Angela Merkel has repeatedly stressed that in order to defeat the virus, the number – known widely as R0 or just R – must stay below 1. If the rate stays above 1 for a long period of time, there could come a point when there are more sick people than hospitals can handle. When it’s higher than 1, it is spreading. When it falls below 1, the epidemic is fading. The high reproduction number shows how easily the virus spreads when left unchecked.
Over the weekend, it went as high as 2.88. The obscure epidemiological concept became a household term, with front pages across Europe reporting “A huge spike in Germany’s R.” According to Germany’s center for disease control, the Robert Koch Institute, the rate now stands at 2.76, which means that one infected person is, on average, currently passing the virus on to 2.76 other people. The outbreak at the Toennies meat plant in Guetersloh sparked fear in Germany partly because it pushed the country’s reproduction rate way up. Health authorities in the area are testing anyone who may have been infected.
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