The core data shown here is Rt, the COVID-19 reproductive rate. For a given infectious disease, the reproductive rate (Rt) is the number of additional cases in a community that a single person creates. When Rt is less than 1, a disease's spread is manageable. Conversely, when the reproductive number exceeds 1, the number of people infected grows exponentially. An adaptive infection control policy estimates Rt for a given locale and makes per-district determinations about which activities will be allowed to control the spread of the virus, and where medical supplies should be routed.

This plot on the right shows the estimated Rt as a function of time. The grey line is an estimate of the reproductive number as each date for the given data available. When Rt is greater than one, cases are rising and pressure on hospitals is expected to go up. High levels of Rt can indicate an impending emergency and provide guidance to policy-makers on anticipated hospital and oxygen demand.

This project is a collaboration between Development Data Lab (Sam Asher, Toby Lunt, Paul Novosad, and Aditi Bhowmick), Anup Malani, Satej Soman, Sabareesh Ramachandran, and Ruchir Agarwal.

To download the complete data hosted on this map as well as state level summaries and licensing terms, please click here. To download additional district-level data on COVID and COVID risk, visit DDL’s COVID data page.

For more information on the predictions, please send us a message or read the paper describing the estimation of Rt.