India may see fourth Covid wave around June 22: IIT Kanpur Study

India may see fourth Covid wave around June 22: The peer-reviewed study, recently posted on preprint repository MedRxiv, used a statistical model to make predictions, finding that a potential new wave would last up to four months

The fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India may begin around June 22 and peak by mid to late August, suggests a modeling study conducted by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur.

The peer-reviewed study, recently posted on preprint repository MedRxiv, used a statistical model to make predictions, finding that a potential new wave would last up to four months.

The study, led by Sabra Prasad Rajeshbhai, Subhra Shankar Dhar, 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 January 30, 2020,” the study authors said. and Shalabh of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, IIT Kanpur, suggests that the severity of the fourth wave will depend on the emergence of a possible new coronavirus variant and vaccination status across the country.

Therefore, the fourth wave begins on June 22, 2022, reaches its peak on August 23, 2022, and ends on October 24, 2022,” he wrote in the research paper.

However, the researchers noted that there is always a reasonable possibility that a possible new variant of the coronavirus could have a profound effect on the overall analysis. He said the effect would depend on various factors such as the infectibility of the variant, fatality, etc.

“Apart from this fact, the effect of vaccination—the first, second, or booster dose—can also play an important role on various issues related to the probability of infection, the degree of infection, and the fourth wave,” the authors said.

World Health Organization officials recently warned that Omicron may not be the final COVID variant and the next strain could be more contagious.

“The next version of the concern will be more appropriate, and that means it will be more permeable because it has to go beyond what is currently going on,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO’s COVID-19 technical chief.

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The same research team had earlier predicted that the third wave of the pandemic would peak in India by February 3, 2022. That research studied the trend of the Omicron-led surge in Covid-19 cases in other countries and predicted that India would witness the same. a similar trajectory.

In the current study, the researchers applied statistical method to COVID-19 data from India to predict the occurrence of fourth wave in the country. “This method can be used to predict fourth and other waves in other countries as well,” they said.

The researchers noted that many countries have already seen a third wave of COVID-19, and some countries such as South Africa and Zimbabwe have begun to face fourth and higher waves of the pandemic.

“A third wave of COVID-19 was predicted for India using data from Zimbabwe, and while the third wave is coming to an end in India, it is now clear that the forecast was correct,” the authors said.

The one-day rise in coronavirus infections fell below 10,000 after two months, with 8,013 cases taking India’s total tally to 4,29,24,130, according to data updated by the Union health ministry on Monday.