The peak of the ongoing third wave in the country could go as high as 8 lakh cases in a day — almost twice the peak of the second wave — but the sharp rise in major cities like Mumbai or Delhi could be arrested very soon, perhaps by the middle of this month, said IIT-Kanpur professor and mathematician Manindra Agrawal.
He said his projection is based on current calculation, which is preliminary as data for the entire country is still not in.
The third wave (for the country) is expected to peak somewhere in the beginning of next month or even slightly earlier. As of now, for an estimate, we predict a wide range between four to eight lakh cases a day. The all-India curve has just started to rise. It will take another month’s time to come down. By middle of March, the third wave of the pandemic should be more or less over in India,” Agrawal said.
Agrawal said his remarks on the impact of elections was based on his analysis last year on the Covid situation in 16 states, five of which had gone to elections just ahead of the second wave.
“For each of these states, we computed the parameters which governed the trajectory of their second wave. There were five parameters which we took into account and which basically determined how fast the pandemic spread in each of these states. We had grouped them into two: five states that went to elections and 11 that didn’t. We computed to see if there is a difference in these two groups. We ran proper statistical experiments. And we found that, statistically, there was no difference between the two groups (of states). Which means or suggests that elections did not play a major role in the spread of the pandemic in the five states,” Agrawal said.
