Anticipating the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic

Taranjot Kaur; Sukanta Sarkar; Sourangsu Chowdhury; Sudipta Kumar Sinha; Mohit Kumar Jolly; Partha Sharathi Dutta

To mitigate the epidemic, China strictly restricted public movement and followed measures of quarantine and symptomatic isolation 24 days later (i.e., 23 January) to the arrival of the first reported case. The total reported cases (confirmed) at the time of the lockdown were nearly 623 (accounting for approximately 4.4732×10 −7 of the total population). The daily increase in the number of confirmed cases in China, thus, saturated nearly in mid of March, hence flattening the growth curve of the total confirmed cases. European countries adopted different non-pharmaceutical measures to intervene in the disease transmission. The spread began later in Italy as compared to China; however, the strict interventions were initiated on 9 March, which marks a gap of nearly 40 days from the first reported case. Spain, which is continued to suffer severely by the virus, reported its first infected case on 1st Feb and took nearly 45 days to put the country on lockdown(see Table I ). India confirmed its first case on 30 January and prompted "Janata curfew" and lockdown measures for complete cessation of public contacts nearly around 22 March, with approximately 2.36 × 10 −7 of its population as COVID-19 infected cases, while this proportion was more than 1.7 × 10 −4 % in the US. Therefore, it is essential to unfold how prolonged gaps between the arrival of the epidemic and non-pharmaceutical interventions such as quarantining/social distancing can influence public health and the environment at a national as well as a global scale. More interesting is to understand if the statistical tools can be useful to formulate laws to stifle the spread of an epidemic.