Thursday, July 16, 2020

COVID-19: One Week long projection post mid july

How would you call the COVID-19 situation in India for the last week. In contrast to what I hear around, I would say, the situation in India is improving.
Lets see the reasons why I feel so:
- Recovery rate has gone up to 63%. So, there is almost 2/3rd chance of survival for every person getting infected by COVID
- The mortality rate has now reduced down to ~2.5%, way down from 3.2% in a 10 days duration.This is happening because of more and more testing. Today's report said, we did record 3.2 lakh testing in a day. This implies that the possibility of death because of COVID-19 is getting low. It may mean,  most of the people around can do fine with a little low panic level. Of course, precautions are necessary, if you don't want to fall in that very low 2.5% mortality set.

Coming down to numbers.
I am happy to see that India deviated significantly from my mid-July projection of 10.25 lakhs. Good to see the lowered down number. This shows the kind of control we are getting on the COVID spread. In my June end post I projected 11.5 lakhs, which I corrected to 10.25 lakhs last week. But in reality, today its standing at 9.75 lakhs. Some one may call it wrong projections, but I would call it corrections, because of the day to day actions taken by the government and other contributing people in the fight. You might be seeing big spikes in recent times. If those numbers are worrying you, the expected spikes were much bigger than the current ones and its all the credit to the steps taken to curb the spread. Going with the current scenario, I see the number reaching a mark of 12- 12.3 lakhs by 22nd July. I would be surprised if the number crosses this mark before that time.
The major contributor, Maharashtra is showing some big spikes reaching upto 8k per day. In spite, its number fell short of my projections of 3.25 for mid July. One of the reasons behind this lag is the control over the spread within Mumbai. At one point Mumbai was reporting 2000+ cases per day, which has now reduced down to less than 1000 cases per day. Means Mumbai has  probably crossed the peak. The big number which we are seeing is because of the rest of Maharashtra. Places like Thane, Pune, Aurangabad  are moving towards their peak and reporting higher and higher number every day. This shall too pass very soon. In coming week, I see the number touching 3.3 lakh cases by July 22. Going by this, we have gained 1 weeks time to reach that mark.
Tamilnadu also has shown some improvements. As a result, the number was restricted to 1.52 lakhs instead of projected 1.75 lakhs. In coming week, the number may reach 1.8 - 1.9 lakh case. 
Delhi has given a big surprise. Last week, I revised the projections for Delhi from 1.75 lakhs to 1.25 lakhs. And today we see, the number is even lower than the revised projection. Last week I also said that Delhi is on way to recovery and that looks actually happening. There are no surprising spikes and even per day rise rate is also decreasing. If it continues, we can see the number restricted to 135000 by 22nd July.
One state that has come up in the picture is Karnataka. This week, it replaced Gujrat from the 4th position. I did a projection of 47000 cases by mid-July, with a worse case scenario of 65000 cases. Luckily, my normal scenario prevailed and we see today's Karnataka number of 47253 cases. Although, now, am projecting a rise upto 68000 by July 22 for Karnataka, the number may show some variations, considering the Karnataka government is taking some very strict steps to get a control on the COVID rise. Lets hope for the best.
There are couple of other states which are showing some significant rise in last few days. But, I do not think, any of these states would try to take up the place of Mahrashtra or Tamilnadu. I am listing down projections for some of these states down here:

State                                22nd July Projections
----------------------------------------------------------
UP                                        57000
TEL                                      50000
AP                                        50000

I wish my projections go wrong and all of them fall short of the target.

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