A Comprehensive Analysis of COVID-19 Outbreak situation in India

Rajan Gupta; Saibal Kumar Pal; Gaurav Pandey

The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.08.20058347 doi: medRxiv preprint 6 There are almost 5000 confirmed cases reported in India as on the morning of 7 th April 2020 with more than 90% cases being active. The death rate has been keeping under 3% at all the stages of the COVID-19 spread. Looking at the graph in Figure 2 , it is clearly evident that a spike has been reported in India after 22 nd March 2020 i.e. the time when lockdown was announced. It clearly shows that Indian authorities were quick enough to sense the spread rate in Indian region and taking necessary steps of maintaining social distancing by announcing a rigid step of lockdown. . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. Looking at the growth rate of infected cases on daily basis (blue line) and the trend line of expected growth (red line) in Figure 3 , it appears that in early days of infection the growth rate was quite high due to low number of cases. The growth rate has been calculated as the difference in number of cases between two consecutive days, divided by the count of infected cases on the previous day of the two days under consideration, multiplied by 100. Since, in the early days the count was in single digits, so the growth rate was pretty high. Hence ignoring that period, considering the second phase of time period from 5 th March to 22 nd March 2020 i.e. exactly before the lockdown, the growth rate has been hovering around 20% with trend line forecasting it to be maximum around 28%. However, for the time period after lockdown i.e. from 22 nd March 2020 onwards, the growth rate slightly increased, but it remained around a similar mark of 20%. And the trend line also predicted the growth rate on per day basis to be around maximum of 28%. Therefore, it can be said that the national lockdown has been able to contain the growth of the number of cases of COVID-19 patients. Without lockdown, the growth might not have been contained in India and may have gone into the exponential zone too quickly. This gives all the state level and national level administrators and health workers to get prepared for the rising number of cases.