Coronavirus cases have been rising steadily now in India. And it is keeping up with the trends of exponential growth observed elsewhere in the world. This means that we can now confirm that the corona outbreak has happened sometime in late February to early March. And now has reached an epidemic state in India. India has started locking down its cities (and in some cases the entire state). But what will happen soon and are the measures taken good enough to contain its spread? This is the question that we will try to answer in this article.

Damage Assessment

For this, I manually plotted the total confirmed cases¹ each day in March, along with lines to represent the trend if the numbers of confirmed cases doubled every two days y = 2^(x/2) and three days y = 2^(x/3). And the result was as follows:

Covid-19 Trend in India

Here, the dots are the total confirmed cases till that day. The violet line is the trend for cases to double every two days and the red one is for cases to double every 3 days.

The black line is for cases to double every 2.4 days

y = 2^(x/2.4)

From this, we can safely assume that if we do not take any precautionary/safety/control measures to curb the growth, then the numbers will double every 2–3 days.

Now we can work with this to figure out timelines of the spread. We can reverse the equation and get the formula:

y = 2.4*log(x)/log(2)

where x is the number of people and y is the number of days to spread to all x.

The total population in India is around 1.3 billion people² as per 2017 metrics. And putting this in the equation, we get that it would take approximately 73 days to spread to everyone in India if left unchecked, of which 21 days have already passed. And since the incubation period for the virus is about 2 weeks, we can use the first equation to estimate the total number of infected people right now (most of which are unreported), which comes out to be approximately 24.5 thousand people.

To make matter worse, as per a 2013 survey, there are only 13 lakhs (1.3 million) hospital beds³ available in India. Putting this in the same equation we get approximately 49 days to fill all hospital beds. Again, 21 days have already passed. Meaning, at the current rate, in the next two weeks, the virus would have infected 14 lakh people and we will see hospitals reaching their total capacity in about 4 weeks.

If it is still unclear, these numbers are not in our favor and even at a 3% death rate, about 4 lakh (400 thousand) people will die. So indeed this is a dire situation and we should take measures at Government, organization and individual level as well.

Virus’s strong and weak points

It has been identified that the virus has following strong points going it is favor:

1. It is highly contagious.

2. Incubation time is of 2 weeks making early detection hard.

But the virus also has some weak points too, that plays in our advantage:

1. Low death rate.

2. It is mostly not fatal to the young population.

Steps that can be taken by the Government

Create isolation camps in each state and transport infected people to these camps as soon as they are identified. These camps should be provided with adequate food and medicines. Also, ask for volunteers, from the young population only (as the death rate is just 0.09%)⁴ who would be trained for a week and then taken to these camps to help the doctors and nurses.

These will be a one-way trip and they will have to stay at the camp till the virus is not brought under control.

Often, volunteers could be from the immediate family of the infected. This will put the patient to ease and also increase the time by which we will hit the maximum capacity of the hospitals and camps.

Also, spreading awareness among people to stay inside and maintain hygiene would help. Tell them that since the virus has 14 days of the incubation period, any steps taken today will bear fruit only after 2 weeks and so not get restless and cooperate with whatever is happening.

Steps that can be taken by organizations

Private organizations and NGOs can help in spreading awareness and collect and provide funds for these camps.

Regular reminder to stay at home and use available technology to solve problems and avoid human contact as much as possible.

It has also been reported in multiple news sources that malaria medicine, Hydroxychloroquine is quite effective in treating the infected⁵. Pharmaceutical companies can concentrate their resources to verify these claims and if found true, should increase the production of these and provide medicine at the manufacturing rate or lower. Losses can be recovered later.

Steps to be taken at an individual level

If you are someone from the young age group, volunteer for these camps and encourage your friends to do so. Do not force anyone. Maintain good hygiene. Also, if you can then donate in whatever capacity you can. Remember that we have only a few weeks before everyone is infected and the more we wait, it will be harder to control.

Understand that exponential growth means that if we are looking at 73 days timeline for 100% infection then 50% infection would be around the 70th day.

Conclusion

As per the numbers mentioned above, it might already be too late but we should take hard decisions now and wait for the next 2 weeks to see its result. This will be a long and hard isolation but is completely necessary.

References