Ongoing surge in Covid19 cases could peak in July

Hyderabad: The ongoing surge of Covid-19 infections, widely believed to be driven by the BA4 and BA5 variants of Omicron in Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra could peak sometime in July, a preliminary assessment by the SUTRA mathematical model for forecasting pandemics has revealed.

For the past one week, the South Indian States of Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Telangana, apart from Maharashtra and Delhi have witnessed a significant surge in Covid infections. 

While the average daily caseload in Maharashtra and Kerala are above 2,000, other South Indian States are reporting anywhere between 150 and 500 positive cases every day.

The SUTRA forecast, developed by mathematicians from IIT-Kanpur and Hyderabad had accurately forecasted the peak of three previous Covid waves. 

This time too, the forecast is quite consistent with the projections made by the public health officials of Telangana. 

“We are expecting the cases to rise consistently till another six weeks, which means somewhere in July.  We could perhaps witness the cases gradually dropping after that,” this was said by the Director of Public Health Dr. G. Srinivasa Rao during a recent interaction with the media.

The SUTRA researchers have also pointed out that the current Covid surge is highly unstable and that they would take atleast a week or so to make an exact forecast or prediction. It is also becoming clear that the surge across multiple Indian States is due to the BA4 and BA5 variants.  

The latest genome sequencing data (till June 5) from the Indian SARS-CoV-2 Genomics (INSACOG) has indicated that the BA5 variant is active in Telangana and Tamil Nadu, while BA4 is active in Maharashtra.