India Likely To Have 2.87 Lakh Corona Positive Cases Daily Next Year: MIT Study

New Delhi: The researchers of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have estimated that India might report 2.87 lakh coronavirus cases per day by the end of winter 2021.

According to a study conducted by the researchers of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, the world may witness 249 million (24.9 crore) cases and 1.8 million (18 lakh) deaths by spring 2021, if there are no effective treatments or vaccination, IANS reported.

The MIT research team used a multi-country modified SEIR (Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, Recovered) model, a standard mathematical model for infectious diseases used by epidemiologists, to simultaneously estimate the transmission of COVID-19 in 84 countries (4.75 billion people).

The model tracked community transmission, excluding the global travel network and instead separately estimating the date of introduction of patient zero for each country.

Within each country, the core of the model tracks the population through susceptible, pre-symptomatic, infected pre-testing, infected post-testing, and recovered states.

“Our model captures transmission dynamics for the disease, as well as how, at the country level, transmission rates vary in response to risk perception and weather, testing rates condition infection and death data, and fatality rates depend on demographics and hospitalisation,” the researchers explained.

According to the study, the top 10 countries by projected daily infection rates at the end of winter 2021 are India, US, South Africa, Iran, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, France and Germany.

India will be the worst affected country due to coronavirus followed by the US (95,000 cases per day), South Africa (21,000 cases per day) Iran (17,000 cases per day), and Indonesia (13,000 cases per day) at the end of winter 2021, the research paper said.