How fast coronavirus is spreading in each state, according to Instagram co-founders ’new site, Recode
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Over the weekend, Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched rt.live , a website that calculates how fast the coronavirus is spreading in each state. This might seem like a surprising move for two people who became rich and famous for building a photo-sharing app. Then again, they also know a thing or two about metrics and algorithms.
While the numbers of cases and deaths are important metrics, these figures lag behind the present situation since it takes a while before symptoms show and people are tested. That’s why Systrom and Krieger zeroed in on a different metric: the effective reproduction rate (Rt) of Covid – 26. Their new site presents this Rt metric in a series of charts showing how the spread of coronavirus in the United States shifts over time.
You might be more familiar with the basic reproduction number (R0) , which represents the number of infections caused by a single infection of a given disease. Rt, which is sometimes referred to as Re, uses statistical adjustments to create a more real-time and dynamic estimate of how fast the disease is spreading. Plotted out over the past few weeks, the Rt metrics of every state in the country can show the spread of the novel coronavirus being affected by government actions like stay-at-home measures.
“I was thinking about the metric I’d need to make decisions during times of uncertainty and this seemed like the right fit,” Systrom told Recode.
An Rt value of one means each case causes one new case, on average. If the value is less than one, the spread of the disease is slowing and will likely peter out over time. A value higher than one means it will spread to more and more of the population, so the higher the value, the worse the spread.
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