– The infестion R-naught. If a positive-tested person is locked in a room with 20 other people for 1 week, touching their faces, hugging and talking to all, will all of them get infected?

Question

– The infестion R-naught. If a positive-tested person is locked in a room with 20 other people for 1 week, touching their faces, hugging and talking to all, will all of them get infected?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Possibly, but that has little to do with the R_0 quantity in populaтion modelling. The R_0 indicates the average number of individuals a single individual will infect over the course of its life (or equivalently, whatever time they are contagious).

If you have one person infected and you’re only considering one week, the R_0 is not a very useful metric.