NEW DELHI: A working group under the ICMR is set to release a calculator which will be an online early warning tool for district authorities to forecast local Covid spikes, taking into account various epidemiological factors at any given time.
The initiative comes amid the emerging understanding that districts with low seroprevalence may see pandemic surges. Senior authorities in the health ministry and the ICMR said that it is an effort to use local data to guide actions in view of the emerging situation.
Such a tool is necessary amid uncertainty about when and where the next surge might take place, they added.
“The idea is to handover a tool to the states in the coming days so that they are able to predict and foresee the Covid numbers and then switch on measures accordingly,” a joint secretary in the ministry said.
The ICMR’s fourth round of nationwide serosurvey, which concluded in July, found that overall nearly 68 % of people in India might have already been exposed to SARS CoV 2. It, however, also meant that nearly 30-40 crore people were still susceptible.
“Moreover these people may be widely scattered across India,” said an ICMR official.
“The geographic distribution of the susceptible population makes local early warning alerts important and that is why we are working on this calculator.”
For the model to work, authorities would need to input numbers such as seroposivity rate, speed of infection spread into the system. It will then forecast the probability of a surge.
“As of now, this calculator is being given the final touches and the health ministry too is guiding us,” another ICMR official said.
For developing the simulator, members of the ICMR working group are seeking inputs from various states such as Kerala.
“We are hoping that all these back and fro will help using local data for local action – whether it is state level information or information related to a district,” said the official.
Given the possibility of missing data, there will also be a provision of an information bubble pop up. This, authorities said, will help the users to feed data, which could serve as the best possible guess specific to a setting.