India’s COVID Infections Heading For Decline: New Cambridge School Tracker

By OB Bureau On May 12, 2021

New Delhi: A new tracker developed by researchers at Cambridge Judge Business School and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has concluded that considering there are less than four lakh cases for a week now, the number of new coronavirus infections has peaked and is fast heading for a decline.

“But there is substantial variation among states and union territories in their trajectories, with cases continuing to increase over the next two weeks in areas such as Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Tripura,” News18 quoted researchers as saying.

The projections are based on reported numbers and are in line with those from some other experts, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s advisers.

According to virologist Shahid Jameel, India’s second COVID-19 wave seems to have flattened but the climb down will be a more prolonged and long-drawn-out process than the first and will possibly run till July.

The new variant

Though the new variants of the virus may partly be responsible for the explosion in the number of cases, there is no indication the mutant versions are more lethal, the director of the Trivedi School of Biosciences, Ashoka University was quoted as saying.

The curve may have flattened but the other side of the peak is not going to be an easy climb down.

“A recent risk assessment of the situation in India conducted by WHO found that resurgence and acceleration of COVID-19 transmission in India had several potential contributing factors, including an increase in the proportion of cases of SARS-CoV-2 variants with potentially increased transmissibility; several religious and political mass gathering events which increased social mixing; and, underuse of and reduced adherence to public health and social measures,” the research study said.