Worst yet to come in Telangana: COVID-19 cases likely to peak in July

HYDERABAD:  Telangana is yet to see the worst of Covid-19 pandemic. New information has emerged from a model developed by researchers from Homi Bhabha National Institute (HBNI), a deemed university aided by Department of Atomic Energy, which predicted when the number of active cases might peak and when would the pandemic come to an end in the State as well as in the entire country.

The HBNI researchers developed a real time application named ‘COV-IND Predictor’ based on a mathematical model developed by them and is publicly available in the format of a simple Google sheet. This automatically syncs with the latest data from Covid-19 dashboard on a daily basis and updates the predictions real-time.

Based on the number of Covid-19 cases recorded in Telangana till June 6, the model predicts that the State will experience the worst case scenario next month, to be precise on July 12, when it would be dealing with a whopping 2,977 active Covid-19 cases.

The HBNI researchers have also reported that the ‘end time’ of this epidemic — when 99 percent of total expected cases of Covid-19 would be reached, by when most infected persons would have recovered.

State to be free of virus by Dec, predicts study

For Telangana, the end time has been predicted to be in December 2020 — around December 27 to be exact. By this date, the State would have recorded as many as 33,746 cases and be having around 1,800 active cases.

Dr Balvinder Kaur Sapra and Prof Bijay Kumar Sahoo of the Homi Bhabha National Institute (HBNI) developed this model to predict the Covid-19 numbers, which comes very close to actual numbers being reported.

For example, the HBNI model predicted that Telangana would be recording 1,756 active Covid-19 cases by June 6 and a cumulativ total of 3,476 cases.  This is very close to the actual numbers of 1,663 active cases and 3,496 total cases. According to the HBNI model, India would be experiencing the worst of Covid-19 cases in July when the number of active cases will be around 1.7 lakh. 

The end time of the Covid-19 pandemic in the country would be in January 2021, by which time the country would have most likely have recorded over 13.1 lakh cases.

This study highlights the need for people to follow all precautionary measures for the entire year, even though normalcy seems to have returned post-lockdown.