Predictions, role of interventions and effects of a historic national lockdown in India's response to the COVID-19 pandemic: data science call to arms

Debashree Ray; Maxwell Salvatore; Rupam Bhattacharyya; Lili Wang; Shariq Mohammed; Soumik Purkayastha; Aritra Halder; Alexander Rix; Daniel Barker; Michael Kleinsasser; Yiwang Zhou; Peter Song; Debraj Bose; Mousumi Banerjee; Veerabhadran Baladandayuthapani; Parikshit Ghosh; Bhramar Mukherjee

For the longer-term forecast until June 15, we considered three hypothetical post-lockdown scenarios: (i) people return to normal activities due to the urgent desire for reconnecting after lockdown; (ii) people return to moderate activities as they did during the period with social distancing and travel ban intervention; and (iii) people make a cautious return out of fear for the coronavirus and partake in subdued activities. For these three scenarios, we assume mean for R0 prior moves back up from 0.8 to 2.0, 1.5 and 1.2 respectively three weeks after lockdown ends on April 14. We compared these post-lockdown scenarios with another hypothetical scenario involving perpetual social distancing and travel ban only without any lockdown (we fixed the mean for R0 prior at 1.5 over the entire intervention interval). The changes to R0 values across our simulation scenarios are depicted in Figure 3 .