KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 21 — India’s government committee has predicted that 50 per cent of its 1.3 billion population could be infected with Covid-19 by next February.
“Our mathematical model estimates that around 30 per of the population is currently infected and it could go up to 50 per cent by February, “ Manindra Agrawal professor at the Indian Institute for Technology in Kanpur and a committee member tasked with providing Covid-19 projections told Reuters.
Members of this government committee include virologists, scientists, and other experts.
The committee, using a mathematical model, has estimated that around 30 per cent of the population has already been infected with the coronavirus, double the number of the Centre’s serological survey, which only showed that 14 per cent of India’s population had been infected as of September.
However, Agrawal said that the serological surveys might not be getting the sampling correct because of the sheer size of the population that they were surveying.
“We have evolved a new model which explicitly takes into account unreported cases, so we can divide infected people into two categories—reported cases and infections that do not get reported,” Agrawal said.
The committee warned that if precautionary measures like social distancing and wearing face masks were ignored, then their projections will not hold up and cases could spike by up to 2.6 million infections in a single month.
As festival seasons are nearing this month and next month in India, experts also warned that there could be a rise in the number of Covid-19 cases
India so far has seen a total of 7.65 million positive Covid-19 cases with 115,950 deaths, and is second to the United States in terms of total infections which had reported 8.52 million positive Covid-19 cases so far.
