Study of Epidemiological Characteristics and In-silico Analysis of the Effect of Interventions in the SARS-CoV-2 Epidemic in India

Archisman Mazumder; Mehak Arora; Vishwesh Bharadiya; Parul Berry; Mudit Agarwal; Mohak Gupta; Priyamadhaba Behera

The median age of affected patients in our study sample of 413 was 36 years (IQR, 25-54) and higher in females (40 years) compared to males (35 years). In study cohorts of Wuhan, the median age of affected patients ranges from 49-56 years (4, 23, 24). Thus, there are more people affected at a lower age in India when compared to China. This observation can be explained by the population distribution of India. In previous studies on COVID-19, it has been established that the risk increases with age and comorbidities (13, 23, 24). However, according to the population demographics in India for 2020 (25), the broad based nature of India's population pyramid means there are more people in the younger age group and very few people in the equal to or above 80 years age group . This is reflected in the number of cases which are more in the younger age groups. On normalizing the percentage of patients in each age group with the corresponding percentage representation of the population, we observed that the highest number of male patients is in the 20-39 years age group category. Interestingly, according to this analysis, males in the 20-39 years age group are affected more than the 60-79 years age group males and equal to or above 80 years age group males. This is something that has not been reported until now and it has to be seen whether this changes as the number of cases in India grows. This is new to the literature of COVID-19 and needs to be studied further. Similarly . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.