Prime Minister Boris Johnson today confirmed that the reproduction rate of the coronavirus in Britain is below one, meaning the virus is running out of road.
The PM said the lockdown has pushed the number, known as the R0 (R-nought), low enough that the COVID-19 outbreak will peter out if it can be kept below one.
The R0 indicates how many people the average patient infects before they recover - the higher it is, the faster the virus is spreading.
Scientists say that as long as the rate is above one the outbreak will continue because the virus is still spreading faster than one-to-one in the community.
Sir Patrick Vallance said, the UK's R0 was between 0.6 and 0.9 and 'probably somewhere between 0.5 and 0.7' in London. He added: 'It's not exactly uniform across the country'.
In this afternoon's Downing Street briefing the chief scientist said: 'What we’re doing now, and this is really important going forward, is actually measuring the R by measuring the number of active infections of a random population survey...
'It’s always the case in an epidemic [that] you get closer and closer to a precision value - it’s never going to be absolutely precise but we will narrow it down and it’ll be more of a measured R, which I think is an important point.'
As the Government tries to bring the nation out of its current social distancing measures it must mix and match rule changes in a way that keeps the R0 as low as possible....<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...