The peak of the third wave of COVID-19 in India is expected to occur in the next fortnight, according to a preliminary analysis by IIT Madras. India's R-value, which indicates the rate of spread of coronavirus has further reduced to 1.57 in the week from January 14-21; the number was recorded at 2.2 in the week of January 7-13, while it was 4 from January 1-6 and 2.9 from December 25-31.
R-value indicates the number of people an infected person can spread the disease to. A pandemic is considered to end if this value goes below 1.
The preliminary analysis was done by computational modeling by IIT Madras' Department of Mathematics and Centre of Excellence for Computational Mathematics and Data Science, headed by professors Neelesh S Upadhye and S Sundar. According to the data, the R-value of Mumbai was 0.67, of Delhi was 0.98, of Chennai was 1.2 and Kolkata’s was 0.56.
According to PTI, Assistant Professor in the department of Mathematics of IIT Madras Dr Jayant Jha said that the R-value of Mumbai and Kolkata shows that the peak is over there and it is becoming endemic, while for Delhi and Chennai it is still close to 1.
"The reason for that could be that as per the new ICMR guidelines they have removed the requirement for contact tracing and therefore there are less infections as compared to earlier," he told PTI. The apex health body ICMR has issued guidelines, as per which the contacts of COVID-19 patients do not need testing unless identified as high-risk based on their age or comorbidities.
Jha further said that as per their analysis, the COVID-19 peak is likely to come in the next 14 days up until February 6. The earlier prediction was that the peak of the third wave is likely to happen between February 1 and 15. The third wave of COVID-19 is being driven by the Omicron variant. India has logged 3,33,533 new coronavirus cases on Sunday, raising the total tally to 3,92,37,264.