The Cambridge India Tracker had rightly called the peak of the devastating second wave in May.
India could see the growth rate of COVID-19 accelerate within days and enter a rapid but short-lived virus wave as the highly infectious Omron variant traverses through a congested country of nearly 1.4 billion.
“It is likely that India will see a period of explosive growth in daily cases and the rapid growth phase will be relatively short,” Professor Paul Kattuman of the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, which has developed a COVID-19 India tracker, wrote in an email. . “New infections will start to rise in a few days, possibly within this week,” he said, adding that it was hard to predict how high the daily cases could be.
Kattuman and his team of researchers, developers of Bharat COVID Tracker, are seeing a sharp increase in infection rates across India. The tracker, in its December 24 note, saw six states as of “significant concern” with an adjusted growth rate of more than 5% of new cases. According to the tracker, it had spread to 11 Indian states by December 26, which corrects for “days of the week in effect” and other variations.
India, which has so far confirmed 34.8 million infections and 480,290 deaths, is already gearing up to tackle another massive outbreak, though only 653 cases of the highly mutated Omicron have been identified so far. Last week, it allowed booster shots and included teens aged 15 to 18 in the vaccination program. Merck & Co.’s antiviral pill mollupiravir, along with two more vaccines, was approved Tuesday by the local drug regulator.
The Indian capital New Delhi closed cinemas, schools and gyms and banned public gathering on Tuesday, a day after reporting the most new cases in more than four months. Night curfew has started from 10 pm to 5 am and bars, restaurants as well as offices will be crowded with 50% people.
These policy decisions underscore the hard lessons India learned in the aftermath of a deadly delta-led virus wave in April and May that pushed infections to a record-beating 400,000-plus per day. It overwhelmed the country’s hospitals and crematoriums and left its citizens pleading for oxygen and other medical resources on social-media platforms.
The Cambridge India Tracker correctly called the peak of this devastating second wave in May and also predicted in August that India will see a slow burn in its COVID infection curve unless vaccination coverage is high enough . India crossed the 1 billion administered vaccine dose in October and that milestone coincided with the number of new cases.
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