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Covid India: Pandemic to peak by mid-May, scientists say

Mumbai - Experts from IIT predict that active cases in country will go up by a million by mid-May before sliding.

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) scientists, who had earlier this month predicted that the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic could peak by mid-April in India, now claim that it may peak between May 11 and 15 and decline steeply by the end of next month.

Scientists from IIT Kanpur and Hyderabad applied the ‘Susceptible, Undetected, Tested (positive), and Removed Approach’ (SUTRA) model and predicted that active cases would go up by about a million by mid-May before sliding.

“We have found that there is a reasonable chance that the active cases in India could peak sometime between May 11-15 with 3.3 million and 3.5 million cases,” Manindra Agrawal, professor at the department of computer science and engineering at IIT, Kanpur, told a news agency on Friday.

“It is a sharp slope, but on the way down, it would likely be equally sharp, coming down very fast and by end of May may see a dramatic reduction.”

According to them, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh might have reached their peak in new cases, though Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and Telangana may see new cases over the rest of April.

Referring to their prediction, Agrawal said the parameters in their model for the current phase are continuously drifting.

“So it is hard to get their value right,” he said. “Even a little bit of change each day causes the peak numbers to change by several thousand.”