Anticipating the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic

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

Another important aspect is to consider the reported proportion of a population affected at the time of the implementation of intervention measures. So far, Germany and Italy, which had the largest outbreak in Europe around mid of the March, had visible signals of the forthcoming transition (Figs. 2F and 2O). It is noted that each of the countries, namely India, Germany, and Italy, adopted concerned public health measures around the time when the EWSs were visible in their respective data sets (see the arrow-heads on the x-axis in Fig. 1 ). However, the fraction of the population affected by the time in Germany and Italy was much higher (approximately 2.9 × 10 −4 and 1.2 × 10 −4 , respectively) as compared to that for India − 2.36×10 −7 . Thus, the growth curve projected a significant rise in these two countries, whereas the rise in the number of cases in India is still gradual and is expected to follow a similar response owing to the effectiveness of these interventions. Overall, our analyses suggest that delayed interventions (depending upon the signals of CSD) along with the fraction of the affected population can influence the country-wise variation in the daily number of rising cases.