Chennai: A latest study has claimed that India may witness over seven million Covid-19 cases by the first week of October, surpassing the US and emerging as the country with highest number of infections.
The study was done by a team of researchers from BITS Pilani, Hyderabad. Lead researcher Dr TSL Radhika of the Department of Applied Mathematics, BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus said that the team has been engaged in forecasting COVID-19 pandemic in India using advanced statistical learning techniques.
The team has recently communicated its findings to the ‘International Journal of Infectious Diseases’ published by Elsevier.
“Our results, obtained using a model based on statistical learning techniques applied to the existing data, indicate that India is likely to become the top Covid-19 country in the world, surpassing the United States by about the first week of October, that is in about a month’s time,” she said.
The Union Health Ministry data on Friday said the number of coronavirus cases in India breached the 45 lakh mark while a data released by a national public health institute in the US said the number of infections in the North American country crossed six million as of 8 September.
The much-awaited findings of the country’s first national serosurvey conducted by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) have said an estimated 6.4 million or over 64 lakh cases of Covid-19 were estimated in India by early May.
Carried out from 11 May to 4 June, the survey tested blood samples from 28,000 people across 21 states.
Sero-positivity was the highest in the age group of 18 to 45 years (43.3 per cent), followed by those between 46 and 60 years (39.5 per cent); it was the lowest among those above 60 (17.2 per cent).
A total of 64,68,388 adult infections were estimated in India by the early May, the survey said.
The survey report said 0.73% or 64,68,388 adults were exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes the coronavirus disease.