BENGALURU: Even as India is rejoicing the fag end of the of third Covid-19 wave, a team of researchers from IIT-Kanpur has predicted that a fourth wave will hit the country in June and last for four months, peaking in September-October 2022.
The prediction is based on statistical methodology to study and forecast future waves. Using the model they have developed using data from Zimbabwe, they say the fourth wave will start from June 22, reach its peak on August 23, and end on October 24.
“Many countries have already seen the third wave of this virus (eg. India, Germany, US and many more), and a few countries (eg. South Africa and Zimbabwe) have started to face the fourth and higher waves of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The third wave was predicted for India using data of Zimbabwe, and it is now clear that the forecast was almost correct. Motivated by that study, we here investigate the forecasting of the fourth wave of COVID-19 outbreak in India,” says the study led by Sabara Parshad Rajeshbhai, Subhra Sankar Dhar and Shalabh of IIT Kanpur’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics. It has been published in MedRxiv as a pre-print.
Their approach is to use data observed in earlier waves in any country, and train the model over that. “The fundamental assumption in our study is that the behaviour of the SARS virus remains the same all over the world, irrespective of country. If the virus is causing the fourth wave in one country, why will it not cause the same in any other country if the infection starts spreading?” the authors question.
As we observed that Zimbabwe and India have the maximum visible similarities in the shape of Covid waves, cases in Zimbabwe are considered as the training data set, they said. Based on this analysis, it shows that the fourth wave will arrive in India 936 days after the initial data availability date (January 30, 2020). The authors are confident that the curve will reach its peak any time from August 15 to August 31, 2022.
The authors clarified that the entire analysis will be deeply impacted by how and when the next variant arrives. “The impact will depends on factors like the variant’s infectibility, fatality, etc. Also, the effect of vaccination, and even boosters may play a significant role in the possibility of infection, degree of infection and various issues related to the fourth wave,” the authors state. However, the study is yet to be peer-reviewed. The same research team had previously predicted that the third wave of the pandemic in India would peak by February 3, 2022