India may witness a possible increase in the Covid cases as soon as August with the third wave seeing a park of fewer than 100,000 cases in a single day or nearly 150,000 cases in the worst scenario, researchers have said. According to the researchers’ team led by Mathukumalli Vidyasagar and Manindra Agrawal at the Indian Institute of Technology in Hyderabad and Kanpur respectively, citing that the surge will rise the cases which may peak in October.
Bloomberg was told by Vidyasagar in an email that states like Kerala and Maharashtra that have high Covid cases could “skew the picture.”
The third wave of the pandemic may not be as brutal as the second wave when the country reported 400,000-plus daily cases in May which declined thereafter. However, the predictions have still stressed the need to accelerate the vaccination campaign, prepare and deploy monitoring methods to identify emerging hotspots and remain vigilant through genome sequencing that is giving space for new variants to surface.
The delta strain of Coronavirus has resulted in new outbreaks across the world which was detected in India in October 2020.
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Vidyasagar, a professor at IIT Hyderabad in May stated that the pandemic may peak in the coming days referring to a mathematical model. He said, “We predict that the peak will come within a few days. As per current projections, we should hit 20,000 cases per day by the end of June. We will revise this as needed.”
Experts have constantly warned about the ignorance people have been showing as the economy and social activity resumed after the lockdown citing the lingering wave.
However, Vidyasagar’s team predicted in April that the Covid cases may arise in the middle of July that turned wrong. Taking to his Twitter account, Vidyasagar explained that the prediction at that time was incorrect because of fault in parameters as “the pandemic was changing rapidly, even wildly, until about a week ago."
He had also told Reuters that the surge in cases might happen between May 3-5 and while speaking to India Today that it would surge on May 7.
India on Monday reported 40,134 new cases of Coronavirus and 422 deaths in the last 24 hours. The active cases of Covid in the country have reached 4,13,718 and the total death toll in the country is now at 4,24,773, showed the health ministry data. The centre has warned 10 states - Kerala, Maharashtra and northeastern regions, amid an increasing spike in cases and to take measures to curb the spread of the virus.
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Experts have also cautioned people that the delta variant of the Covid-19 that transmits like chickenpox and can be passed on by vaccinated people, can also cause a rise in cases. According to data from the Indian Sars-CoV-2 Genomic Consortium (INSACOG), around 8 of every 10 infection cases in May, June and July resulted from the highly transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus.