Predictions for COVID-19 outbreak in India using Epidemiological models

Rajesh Ranjan

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.02.20051466 doi: medRxiv preprint Figure 5 : Effects of lockdown (assuming exponential growth throughout). Even with social distancing measures and 70% reduction in cases (most optimistic), there will be approximately 30,000 cases by April 20, 2020. Figure 4(b) shows the increase in the number of cases per day. As seen, the cases in the Hubei province continued to rise till Feb 14 to reach a total of 54,406, with the total number of new cases reported on that day being about 6,200. It is to be noted that there is a slight anomaly in data with no new case being reported on Feb 14, whereas a sudden jump in the number of cases (∼ 15, 000) were reported on the following day. Since then, there was a gradual drop in reported numbers of cases, and on Feb 15 and Feb 21, the new cases reported were 1,843 and 220, respectively. From Feb 2 to Feb 15, it took around 14 days for the lockdown to show its effect. The flattening of the curve took further 15 days. i.e. from Feb 15 to March 2, as shown in Figure 4 (a). Table 3 is that India was very early in enforcing lockdown when it had only 536 cases compared to many other countries/cities such as UK, Germany and New York where this strict measure was taken only after COVID-19 entered stage-3, and the spread became uncontrollable. This may become a key factor in controlling this pandemic in India.