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Coronavirus pandemic

Coronavirus R number declines to 0.96 in Russia on Friday

The number remains lower than 1.0 in four of the ten regions showing the highest coronavirus figures

© Sergei Malgavko/TASS

MOSCOW, August 6./TASS/. The spread rate (R) of coronavirus infection in Russia declined to 0.96 on Friday. The R number returned to 0.8 in Moscow, according to calculations by TASS based on data from the anti-coronavirus crisis center.

The number remains lower than 1.0 in four of the ten regions showing the highest coronavirus figures. Apart from Moscow, this is the Moscow Region (0.91), the Voronezh and the Krasnoyarsk regions (0.99).

In St. Petersburg, as well as in the Irkutsk and Sverdlovsk regions, the spread rate is 1.0. In the Samara Region it dropped to 1.01, the lowest on record since mid-July. The R number stands at 1.02 in the Nizhny Novgorod Region and at 1.06 in the Rostov Region.

The coronavirus spread rate shows the number of people one patient can infect before being isolated. Along with other criteria, it was used to define the regions’ readiness for a step-by-step removal of restrictions introduced last spring to combat the pandemic. The rate is used, among other things, to help inform decisions on banning or allowing mass events in Russian regions.

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