14 May 2020
Statistics Jersey today published a new coronavirus report presenting an estimate of the value of the virus’s reproduction number – the so-called R value – over the course of the current outbreak.
The reproduction number can be used to describe how quickly the infection is spreading. It can be thought of as the number of subsequent infections that a new infection will introduce into the population. For example, a reproduction number of 2 indicates that each new infection will infect 2 other people (and these 2 new infections will subsequently each infect 2 new people etc.)
The report uses Jersey infection data in an estimation method developed by scientists at Imperial College, to estimate the Island’s coronavirus R value on a daily basis.
The report indicates that during the early part of the outbreak in Jersey, the central estimate R value ranged from around 1.9 – 2.6. This reduced to between 0.9 – 1.1 following both social distancing and school closures. Finally, during ‘lockdown’, R has ranged between 0.4 - 1.0.
In all cases, for each central estimate of R, consideration should also be given to the associated potential range of R values due to statistical and modelling uncertainty.
For more details on how the modelling was produced, and a chart of the results, please see the report.
Estimate of R Report
gov.je