A study by the researchers from the US have claimed that India might record as many as 2.87 lakh coronavirus cases per day by February 2021 if there’s no vaccine developed till that time.
The prediction was made by a team of researchers including Hazhir Rahmandad, TY Lim, and John Sterman of MIT’s Sloan School of Management. They used the SEIR (Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, Recovered) model, a standard mathematical model for infectious diseases used by epidemiologists to arrive at the conclusion, reported the DNA.
The team from the US-Based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have also said that the global number of COVID-19 cases may climb to 25 crore by May 2021 in the absence of a vaccine.
The researchers said India will surpass the US and become the worst affected country due to coronavirus.
As per the study, the US will have around 95,000 cases per day. It would be followed by South Africa with 21000 cases per day and Iran with 17000 cases per day by the end of February 2021.
To arrive at these numbers, the MIT researchers took three scenarios into account. First, the current testing rates and their response. Second, if testing increases by 0.1 per cent from July 1, 2020, and third, if the testing rate remains the same but contact rate to perceived risk is set to 8 (which means if one infected person can infect eight other people).
“Both these scenarios project a very large burden of new cases in the fall (September-November) 2020, with hundreds of millions of cases concentrated in a few countries estimated to have insufficient responses given perceived risks (primarily India, but also Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the USA), the DNA quoted from the research.