Covid could stay till September, indicates IIT-Kharagpur study

Covid could stay till September, indicates IIT-Kharagpur study

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Kolkata:  23.06.2020

India is unlikely to get rid of Covid-19 before September, a statistical model created by IIT-Kharagpur has predicted.

“The study indicates that India is yet to achieve a steady pattern in the spread of the disease,” said Abhijit Das, a professor in the department of computer science and engineering, who authored the study.

“The country is unlikely to get rid of Covid-19 before the end of September 2020. This does not leave us in a region of comfort, but we have to accept the reality and chalk out appropriate plans to address all the issues associated with the outbreak of the pandemic,” he added.

There has been considerable change in the spread pattern of the disease in India, said Das and attributed it to various causes, like “different mobility patterns of Indians in different phases of lockdown, large-scale migration of labourers, change in diagnostic facilities, evolution of the coronavirus, and so on. “ “These causes are well beyond the control of the logistics model, or any other predictive model. Although the implementation fails to generate stable and reliable predictions, the trend clearly reveals that the disease is going to stay in the country for many more months,” added Das.

Experts in the field of virology and infectious diseases agree on the primary inference of the IIT study that the disease is not going away anytime soon. “We are now in the exponential phase,” said Sumon Poddar, a microbiologist at the Institute of Child Health, Kolkata.

“The worst could be in July and August, after which we could experience the declining phase from September. And, in between, because of diseases like dengue and scrub typhus, we can never say whether there could be coinfections,” said Poddar.

Full report on www.toi.in

WORST NOT YET OVER:

People wait to board a bus at Esplanade in Kolkata on Monday