KUALA LUMPUR, May 28 ― The national Covid-19 infectivity rate, measured as R0 or Rt, has dropped five days in a row to 1.14 as of yesterday, Health director-general Tan Sri Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah announced on Twitter this morning.

The drop was the lowest since it peaked on May 23, when the R value was at 1.21. The R value was 1.12 when a nationwide third movement control order began taking effect on May 11.

The R value represents the average number of vulnerable people that each new Covid-19 patient could potentially infect, with a value of below 1.0 needed to successfully suppress the spread of the disease.

Any value above 1 indicates a high infectivity rate, which means for every citizen in the two states with SARS-Cov-2, they could infect as many as three people.

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Sabah and Melaka are now the most contagious states with R values in both surpassing the 1.2 mark. The R value in the former state is 1.26 and R1.27 in the latter.

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The national R value is measured in a seven day moving window while assessment for states are done at a 14 week interval.

Selangor, currently the state with the highest rate of daily cases, has a R value of 1.12. Kuala Lumpur, a federal territory, has a R value of 1.07, similar to Penang’s.

The Health Ministry has recently opted to use Rt readings in place of basic reproduction number (R0), as the former provides a more useful benchmark for the quickness of the spread of Covid-19.

The country continues to record a surge in Covid-19 cases reaching a record high of 7,857 new cases yesterday, the third day in a row that Malaysia has registered more than 7,000 cases in one day.

Selangor continued to lead with the highest number of new Covid-19 cases by state, at 2,675.

Sarawak and Kelantan come in second and third, at 772 and 754 infections respectively.

There are now a record of 771 Covid-19 patients in intensive care units (ICU) across the country, with 59 deaths recorded in the last 24 hours.