Chennai: With the third wave of Covid-19 flattening, researchers now predict that a fourth wave may begin in India around 22 June and continue till 24 October.
The severity of a fourth wave, however, will depend on the emergence of new variants and the vaccination status of people, including the administration of a booster dose, they said.
The study has been led by Sabara Parshad Rajeshbhai, Subhra Sankar Dhar and Shalabh of IIT Kanpur’s Mathametic department using a mixture of Gaussian distribution based on the data on Zimbabwe. The study has been published as a pre-print in MedRxiv, but it is yet to be peer-reviewed.
According to the researchers, the data indicates that the fourth wave of Covid-19 in India will arrive after 936 days from the initial data availability date, which is 30 January, 2020.
‘Therefore, the fourth wave starts from June 22, 2022, reaching its peak on August 23, 2022 and ends on October 24, 2022,’ they said.
‘Many countries have already seen the third wave and a few countries have started to face the fourth and higher waves of the pandemic. The third wave was predicted for India using the concept of a mixture of Gaussian distribution based on the data of Zimbabwe, and when the third wave in India is finishing it is now clear that the forecast was almost correct.
Motivated by the study, we investigated the forecasting of a fourth wave in India,’ the researchers said.