Predictions for COVID-19 outbreak in India using Epidemiological models

Rajesh Ranjan

Before showing the models for India, we compare the growth of infections with several different countries and states in the US. There have been several reports (see for example, [10] ) that have indicated that the initial slow growth of infections in India could be an artifact of its testing strategy, where testing is limited to specific individuals travelling from high-risk countries and their immediate contacts. Figure 1 shows the growth of infections in India from 1 to 1000, along with other countries and states with a reasonable number of daily international travellers. These places have used different testing strategies to report the number of infections. The growth rate in India is much smaller than places like New York and New Jersey, where the spread is very fast and it took only 16-17 days to reach 1,000 cases. Italy and France took about 29 and 43 days respectively to reach the same figure. On the other hand, places like California and Washington took a relatively long time (about 55-58 days), which is similar to India that took 59 days. Further, the growth curve of India is very close to that of Washington. As India is 9 days behind Washington in outbreak history, this information could be very useful as one may look at the Washington data to make predictions for India.