chandigarh the rvalue reproduction number at which covid19 or any other infection spreads of punjab haryana and himachal pradesh and union territory of chandigarh has dropped below onethe rvalue indicates the average number of people who will catch the infection from an already infected person dropping of the rvalue below one suggests decline in spread of an epidemic however experts assert that it is too early to celebrate as the value needs to stay below one for a long period of timeaccording to the rvalue calculated by prof sitabhra sinha of institute of mathematical sciences in chennai the rate in punjab has come down from 116 recorded between september 6 and 15 to 092 002 while in case of haryana the value has dropped from 120 001 recorded between the period between august 14 and september 17 to 084 the rvalue of the hill state of himachal pradesh and chandigarh also stands at 084rvalue higher than one implies that one infected person can pass on the virus to more than one individual when the value is less than one the existing infection will lead to less than one new infectionexplaining the concept prof sinha said the value of 092 in punjab means that every 10 people who are infected with novel coronavirus would go on to pass the infection to nine people if this trend continues for a sustained period of time the number of infected people will start going down he saidthere has been wide fluctuation in the regions rvalue and it was recorded as high as 243 in the initial period of the pandemic outbreakas per data compiled by prof sinha the rvalue of punjab was 2 on march 14 on the same day haryana had a value of 14 from march 2325 punjab had an estimated value of 165 which went down to 152 during march 30 to april 15 from may 22 to july 1 the value was pegged at 137 and 122 from july 1to august 25in the case of haryana the reproduction rate of the virus was 138 between march 16 till march 21 and rose to 243 between april 1and april 8 the value stood at 205 from april 29 to may 6 and came down to 172 during from may 22 to june 10as many as 248128 people 105220 in punjab118554 in haryana 13386 in hp and 10968 in chandigarh have been infected by the virus till sept 24 4610 people have been killed by the virus in the region 3066 in punjab 1255 in haryana 145 in hp and 144 in chandigarh in recent weeks the region has recorded improvement in recovery rate and the number of active cases have witnessed a drop the health officials in three states and ut have attributed the drop to the sustained containment effortsthe drop in rvalue makes it evident that efforts being put to contain the spread by early identification isolation and treatment of infected people are