The new coronavirus disease turned into a global pandemic because this novel virus could spread weeks without detection. There are several data points that indicate that 20-50% of all coronavirus infections are asymptomatic. Almost all countries are merely reacting to this virus rather than proactively working on preventing its spread. India is one of these countries even though it moved faster than most countries to impose a national lockdown to stop COVID-19 speed train on its tracks.

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In this article I am going to model the number of infections in India and make conservative predictions about the minimum number of deaths that we should expect to see in the next couple of weeks.

In this article I estimated the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 at 1.2% for the United States. However, India has a relatively younger population than the U.S. and I believe its overall infection fatality rate will be lower. To be conservative and keep the math simple, I will assume that India's IFR is 1%.

The main implication of a 1% infection fatality rate is as follows: if 100 people are infected with the new coronavirus today, only 1 of them will lose their struggle with this virus and the remaining 99 people will survive this ordeal.

Approximately 5-6 days after a person is infected with the virus, she begins to show symptoms (fever, cough, fatigue, etc.). There are multiple data points in different countries that indicate that 20-50% of the infected people do not show any symptoms. Therefore, it is thought that these people have an important role in the spread of this virus so rapidly. After the patients show symptoms for 5-6 days, some of them become more severe and have to be hospitalized. The hospital stay is around 14 days on average and then the case is resolved (either recovery or death).

In total, it takes around 24 days for the patient to lose her life after getting infected with the virus. Some researchers use Gamma distributions to model this in their papers, but again we are using a simplified model so that untrained readers could understand our model (using a Gamma distribution doesn't lead to better conclusions).

This is an important figure.

In India today at least 86 people lost their lives because of the coronavirus (I am hoping that Indian authorities didn't undercount the COVID-19 deaths). These people were not infected with this virus today, nor were they infected with it yesterday. These people were infected with this coronavirus around 24 days ago.

In other words, 86 people were infected this virus on March 11th or earlier and lost their lives after fighting with this virus for 24 days on average. We also know that only one out of every 100 people who get the coronavirus lost their lives.

This means that on March 11th, in India there were 100 coronavirus infections for each deaths TODAY. So, there were a total of 8600 people infected with the new coronavirus in India on March 11th. If you understand how we calculated this 8600 figure, it's relatively easy to understand the rest of our model. I am aware that Indian authorities confirmed only 60 COVID-19 cases on March 11th, which explains why the number of infections have been growing exponentially since then.

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