COVID-19 second wave in India may peak by mid-may: Scientists at IIT

The ongoing second wave of the COVID19 pandemic in India may peak between May 1115 with 3335 lakh total active cases and decline steeply by the end of May according to a mathematical module devised by IIT scientists On Friday India saw a singleday rise of 332730 332 lakh COVID19 infections and 2263 fatalities with 2428616 2428 lakh active casesIn predicting that the active cases would go up by about 10 lakh by midMay before sliding scientists from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur and Hyderabad applied the Susceptible Undetected Tested positive and Removed Approach SUTRA modelThe scientists also said Delhi Haryana Rajasthan and Telangana may see a high of new cases by April 2530 while Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh might already have reached their peak in new casesWe have found that there is a reasonable chance that the active cases in India could peak sometime between May 1115 with 3335 lakh cases It is a sharp slope but on the way down it would likely be equally sharp coming down very fast and by end of May may see a dramatic reduction Manindra Agrawal professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering IITKanpur told news agency Press Trust of IndiaThe scientists in the as yet unpublished study said there are several novel features in the SUTRA model Whereas previous papers divided the patient population into asymptomatic and Infected the new model also accounts for the fact that some fraction of asymptomatic patients could also be detected due to contact tracing and other such protocolsEarlier this month the mathematical modelling approach predicted that active infections in the country would peak by April 15 but this didnt come true The parameters in our model for the current phase are continuously drifting So it is hard to get their value right said Mr Agrawal Even a little bit of change each day causes the peak numbers to change by several thousand he explainedThe IIT Kanpur professor added that the SUTRA models prediction of the new peak is sensitive to the daily new infections data Agrawal noted that the model uses three main parameters to predict the course of the pandemic The first is called beta or contact rate which measures how many people an infected person infects per day It is related to the R0 value which is the number of people an infected person spreads the virus to over the course of their infection Mr Agrawal explainedThe other two parameters are reach which is a measure of the exposure level of the population to the pandemic and epsilon which is the ratio of detected and undetected cases There are other mathematical modules as well Independent calculations by Gautam Menon and his team at Ashoka University in Haryana have predicted that the peak of the ongoing wave of infections could be between midApril and midMayMr Menon also cautioned that such projections of COVID19 cases should really be trusted only in the short term Any excessively precise prediction of a peak within just a fiveday window would ignore the many uncertainties associated with the inputs to any such calculation Mr Menon who was not involved in the modelling had told news agency PTI earlierThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever