July end COVID19 projections

This last week seems terrible. The kind of spurt we saw in last many days was unexpected. Yesterday's count was 45000+. I did not expect. Are coming days going to report bigger numbers than this? We need to understand the cycle it follows. Mumbai is a good example. Since beginning Mumbai was heading the race. While other cities were reporting the count in 10's or 100's, Mumbai was reporting in thousands. back then, as much as 60-70% of Mahrashtra's total count was coming from Mumbai. Now after a period of almost 3 months, Mumbai is lagging behind. Pune, Kalyan, Thane have overtaken Mumbai. The famous hotspots of Dharavi, Dadar, Sion, Worli are longer uttered in the news. Of course, the counts are still there, but they do not attract any more attention. This is a cycle which will be followed in every new red zone area. The point is how big spike we allow the zone to get and how quickly we nab it.

Delhi at one point started competing with Mumbai/Maharashtra. But, it has fallen in line pretty quickly and actually is on the way to good recovery. Now the new competitors have come up in the form of Bangalore/Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. They are really emerging as big threat to the invincible position of Maharashtra. All the cycle will complete and we will get all the place back to normal, but the question is when?

The we see big spikes every other day, we see the recovery rate improving and mortality rate decreasing every day. As of now more than 63% people have recovered and the mortality rate has come down to 2.4% from 3.2%.

My projection for India till 22nd July was 12.3 Lakh. This would have gone fine had we not seen the sudden surge of 45000 cases yesterday. With this the dynamics change a bit and we could see a big rise to 16.75 lakhs by the end of this month.

Last week, my overestimated Maharashtra's number of COVID-19 cases. Probably, Maharashtra did not like it and so, this time took care that my projection seems underestimated. My projection was crossed on the last day. I believe, the number for cases in Maharashtra is going to rise significantly and we can see a number of 4.2 lakhs crossed by the end of the month.

Tamilnadu projections were in line. It stands at 1.86 lakhs cases today. There is a kind of change in the trend. We can say now there is a kind of linear variation in the number of cases reported, although the slope is pretty steep. Tamilnadu seems to have lost its curve. I see the number rising upto 2.3-2.4 lakh cases by the month end.

Gujrat and Delhi are two states which was moved away from the limelight of COVID news. Both are doing pretty well. While Delhi is showing signs of recovery, the rate of growth in Gujrat is minimized, though in recovery mode yet. If all things go well for Delhi, we won't see much increase in coming days, but if things twist a bit, the number may reach up to 1.65 lakhs. The numbers for Gujrat also doesn't show much increase. It may rest some where around 62,000 .

Uttar Pradesh reached  pretty close to my projection of 57K. There is still an increasing trend here with the projections showing upto 85000 cases by month end.

Karnataka, as expected is showing newer and newer spikes every day. It crossed my projection by a big margin. But it seems, now it is settled in a new zone and may stay here for some time. By the end of the month, we may see around 1.25 lakh cases reported for the state.

The big surprise of the month is Andhra Pradesh. The cases are rising like anything here. I guess, after  Maharashtra, AP is the only state to report more than 6000 cases in a day. It crossed my earlier projections of 50000 and unlike Karnataka, it is not yet settled in a new zone. The picture could be scary in coming days and we may see a steep rise to 1.3 lakhs by the end of the month.

For Telangana, the projections as of now are pretty spot on. It very close to the projected mark of 50000. We could see the number rising steadily to 75,000 cases by July end.

The sudden spikes we are seeing is actually not a worrisome situation. The number is rising because the number of testing are increasing. While it may indicate that the controlling COVID spread is not much in our hand now, but recovering out of it is largely possible.

Let pray for the best.