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. 2021;136(5):596.
doi: 10.1140/epjp/s13360-021-01586-7. Epub 2021 May 28.

The second and third waves in India: when will the pandemic be culminated?

C Kavitha  1 , A Gowrisankar  1 , Santo Banerjee  2
Affiliations

The second and third waves in India: when will the pandemic be culminated?

C Kavitha et al. Eur Phys J Plus. 2021.

Abstract

An unprecedented upsurge of COVID-19-positive cases and deaths is currently being witnessed across India. According to WHO, India reported an average of 3.9 lakhs of new cases during the first week of May 2021 which equals 47% of new cases reported globally and 276 daily cases per million population. In this letter, the concept of SIR and fractal interpolation models is applied to predict the number of positive cases in India by approximating the epidemic curve, where the epidemic curve denotes the two-dimensional graphical representation of COVID-19-positive cases in which the abscissa denotes the time, while the ordinate provides the number of positive cases. In order to estimate the epidemic curve, the fractal interpolation method is implemented on the prescribed data set. In particular, the vertical scaling factors of the fractal function are selected from the SIR model. The proposed fractal and SIR model can also be explored for the assessment and modeling of other epidemics to predict the transmission rate. This letter investigates the duration of the second and third waves in India, since the positive cases and death cases of COVID-19 in India have been highly increasing for the past few weeks, and India is in a midst of a catastrophizing second wave. The nation is recording more than 120 million cases of COVID-19, but pandemics are still concentrated in most states. In order to predict the forthcoming trend of the outbreaks, this study implements the SIR and fractal models on daily positive cases of COVID-19 in India and its provinces, namely Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Maharashtra.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interestThe authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The schematic diagram of the SIR and fractal model
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
The evolution of the total number of positive cases as the epidemic curve from March 2020 to April 2021 for India and its states
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
The time evolution for the mean of reproduction number during the period January 2021 to April 2021 for India, Delhi, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Comparison of SIR model and fractal model in predictions of the COVID-19 epidemic. Prediction of epidemic rate: SIR model in the left frame and the fractal model in the right frame
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Comparison of SIR model and fractal model in predictions of the COVID-19 epidemic. Prediction of epidemic rate: SIR model in the left frame and the fractal model in the right frame
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Comparison of SIR model and fractal model in predictions of the COVID-19 epidemic. Prediction of epidemic rate: SIR model in the left frame and the fractal model in the right frame
Fig. 7
Fig. 7
Third wave in India: prediction of the epidemic rate as the evolution of time
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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