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

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.05.20053884 doi: medRxiv preprint In the SIR model, the value of β being 0.258 (the range being between 0.24-0.29) and the trend for R t being about 2.50, shows that the interventions which were put in place by the Indian government (assuming a lag period of 11 days) during the mid-March period were partially effective, preventing the scenario where Rt can reach even more than 4 (33), and further data would tell how effective the lockdown is. The increase in β from day 8 is probably due to the identification of the Tablighi cluster and the cases it added to the Indian data (34). The impact of the COVID-19 response (overall quarantine regulations , social distancing, and isolation of infections) in China in this context is encouraging for the many other countries (36) where the Rt gradually stabilized for most provinces ranging between 0.96 to 1.57 where there were more than 100 cases (33), and India should try and replicate this when community transmission starts by strict enforcement of lockdown measures to get the Rt closer to 1,so that COVID would not overwhelm the Indian healthcare system. The Indian government will not be able to minimise both deaths from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the economic impact of viral spread. Keeping mortality as low as possible will be the highest priority for individuals; hence the Indian government must put in place measures to ameliorate the inevitable . 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.