3. Do interventions like travel bans and social distancing help arrest the projected exponential growth of COVID-19 in India?

Yes! We took a close look at what might be coming in the next few weeks and months, based on what we have seen in other countries and an epidemiological model that have been gainfully employed to assess the effect of interventions in Hubei province [Wang et al. 2020]. We find that without enforcing any intervention, the predicted counts are going to exceed the estimated capacity of hospital beds in India, which is 70 per 100,000 Indians (Figure 4). It should be noted that 70 hospital beds per 100,000 people is an upper bound on treatment capacity. Given an average occupancy rate of 75%, only a quarter of these are available [Sindhu et al. 2019]. Moreover, critically ill COVID-19 patients (about 5–10% of those infected) will require ICU beds, which constitute between 5 and 10% of bed capacity in Indian hospitals [Yeolekar & Mehta 2008] with very high occupancy rates. The predicted number of cases by May 15 will be at 161 per 100,000 (i.e. 2.2 million cases nationwide) without any intervention and will drastically reduce to 1 per 100,000 (i.e. 13,800 cases nationwide) with the most severe form of intervention. Here, instead of adjusting the case counts for the total population of India (as in Figure 3), which is perhaps leading to the underestimation of case counts in Figure 3, we adjusted our estimates using the total population from major cities of the Indian states or union territories that are currently COVID-19 hotspots (namely, Kochi, Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru). This analysis shows the impact and necessity of interventions, and all people in India, regardless of their vulnerability to COVID-19, should adopt the public health guidelines issued by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare in India.