India may record as much as 2.87 lakh coronavirus cases per day by February 2021 if there’s no vaccine developed till that time, researchers from US-Based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have claimed.
The prediction was made by a team of researchers including Hazhir Rahmandad, TY Lim, and John Sterman of MIT’s Sloan School of Management. They used the SEIR (Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, Recovered) model, a standard mathematical model for infectious diseases used by epidemiologists to arrive at the conclusion.
The team also said that the global number of COVID-19 cases may climb to 25 crore by May 2021 in the absence of a vaccine.
As per the researchers, India will surpass the US and become the worst affected country due to coronavirus. The study predicted that the US will have around 95,000 cases per day. Following the US would be South Africa (21,000 cases per day) and Iran (17,000 cases per day) by the end of February 2021.
To arrive at these numbers, the MIT researchers took three scenarios into account. First, the current testing rates and their response. Second, if testing increases by 0.1 per cent from July 1, 2020, and third, if the testing rate remains the same but contact rate to perceived risk is set to 8 (which means if one infected person can infect eight other people).
“Both these scenarios project a very large burden of new cases in the fall (September-November) 2020, with hundreds of millions of cases concentrated in a few countries estimated to have insufficient responses given perceived risks (primarily India, but also Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the USA). In contrast, changes in response policies would make a major difference,” the study says.
The researchers also claimed that the number of cases and fatalities would increase significantly in the third scenario where testing rates remain the same but the contact rate is set to 8. In this situation, the global number of cases is predicted to cross 60 crore.
“While actual cases are far greater than official reports suggest, the majority of people remain susceptible. Waiting for herd immunity is not a viable path out of the current pandemic,” the researchers further noted.
Source: dnaindia.com