IIT-Kanpur researchers prediction of fourth Covid wave in June may become true

Hyderabad: Will the prediction by researchers from IIT-Kanpur, made in February that India will face a fourth Covid wave from June 22, 2022 come true? Given the steady rise of Covid infections across different states including Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, fuelling fears of a Covid fourth wave, the prediction from IIT-Kanpur researchers, appears […]

Hyderabad: Will the prediction by researchers from IIT-Kanpur, made in February that India will face a fourth Covid wave from June 22, 2022 come true?

Given the steady rise of Covid infections across different states including Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, fuelling fears of a Covid fourth wave, the prediction from IIT-Kanpur researchers, appears to be not that off-target.

The mathematical study ‘Fourth Wave of Covid-19 in India: Statistical Forecasting’, done by IIT-Kanpur researchers including Sabara Parshad Rajeshbhai, Subha Sankar Dhar and Shalabh, which was published in Medrxiv, on February, 24, 2022, forecasted that the fourth wave in India is likely to set in on June 22, 2022.

“Our study indicates that the fourth wave of Covid-19 in India will arrive after 936 days from the initial data availability date, which is January 30, 2020. Therefore, the fourth wave starts on June 22, 2022, reaching its peak on August 23, 2022 and ends on October 24, 2022. Moreover, the 99 per cent confidence interval for the date, when the curve will reach the peak, is approximately from August 15, 2022 to August 31, 2022,” the researchers in their paper in Medrxiv, claimed.

The researchers said, “our approach is to use the data observed due to Covid-19 in the earlier waves in any country and train the model over that. Once the model is trained, the same is used to forecast the occurrence of the next wave in other countries. The fundamental assumption in our study is that the behaviour of the SARS virus remains the same all over the world irrespective of countries. In other words, our thought process is that if the virus is causing the fourth wave in any country, why it will not cause the same in other countries if the infection started spreading?”.

Public health officials, however, have so far denied that there is a fourth Covid wave in the country. Experts have maintained that available data has not indicated a new variant and there was a need to take-up more genetic sequencing.