Bhubaneswar: India saw a significant drop in COVID-19 cases on Sunday with 10273 fresh cases being reported in the last 24 hours. While the third wave is on the decline, India is likely to be hit by the fourth wave around June 22, the researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, (IIT-K) said.
According to the statistical prediction, published on the preprint server MedRxiv on February 24, the fourth wave in India may arrive 936 days after the initial available date of the COVID-19 outbreak (January 30, 2020), the Times of India reported.
This wave will last for over four months, till October 24, and its severity will depend on the emergence of new variants, vaccination status, and administration of booster doses.
The next wave of SARS-CoV-2 is expected to peak between August 15 and 31, said the team. It used a methodology called “Bootstrap” to compute the confidence interval of the time point of the peak of a fourth wave.
“Many countries have already seen the third wave and a few countries have started to face the fourth and higher waves of the pandemic. The third wave was predicted for India using the concept of a mixture of Gaussian distribution based on the data of Zimbabwe, and when the third wave in India is finishing it is now clear that the forecast was almost correct. Motivated by the study, we investigated the forecasting of the fourth wave in India,” the researchers were quoted as saying.
