Epedemic Calculator
Coronavirus has reached India and is continuing to infect people every day. While we are getting to hear COVID-19 cases in India with every passing minute, we still don't know what's the future of the virus in the country. We don't know when it will finally go away and how many more people it will take on. However, a new Epidemic Calculator is capable of predicting Coronavirus' stance in a country. Read on to know what is the COVID-19 future in India, as per the calculator.
COVID-19 prediction in India
The Epidemic Calculator has been developed by a machine learning researcher, Gabriel Goh. The tool follows the SEIR rule (Susceptible > Exposed > Infected > Removed), which is an 'ideal' model to track the spread of any disease. The tool can be accessed by visiting this link.
The Epidemic Calculator features default data wherein the RO (the rate at which a disease spreads) is 2.2. This means that an infected person can infect two more people in India and this way, over 1 million can be infected in the country. This may even kill around 20,000 people in India. Other predictions by the calculator are that on the 100th day, the country imposes a lockdown. Following a lockdown, the RO will be decreased to 1. Additional prediction is that the fatality rate is 2. If the lockdown was imposed 50 days after the first reported case, the number of cases would have been way less.
Gabriel Goh, in the website, stated, "At the time of writing, the coronavirus disease of 2019 remains a global health crisis of grave and uncertain magnitude. To the non-expert (such as myself), contextualizing the numbers, forecasts and epidemiological parameters described in the media and literature can be challenging. I created this calculator as an attempt to address this gap in understanding."
Going by the data (in a positive scenario), if the fatality rate in India is less than 2, the government takes up good measures and the Coronavirus lockdown proves effective, then the Coronavirus cases in India won't be more than 15,000 and deaths will be around 300. However, if we aren't able to deal with it, Coronavirus can take around 1000 to 5 million lives and can affect around 180 million in India. Again, this depends on the measures taken by the government of a particular country and how those measures affect the Coronavirus infection.
As a reminder, the tool has predictions based on the data that's added into it and doesn't tell concrete things. Another thing that needs to be considered is that the Coronavirus data isn't completely available right now and everything the tool shows is just a projection. Hence, relying on it fully shouldn't be an option.
