Telangana's peak case load likely in 10 days: Experts

HYDERABAD: Even as the Covid-19 cases in second wave are increasing and the daily count is breaking the earlier records, an analysis has shown that Telangana has an R value of 1.5 if the estimated figures of April are taken into consideration.
Technically, R value of 1 means 100 infected people will be infecting another 100 people. Telangana has an R value of 1.5, which means that every 100 infected people will infect 150 people who, in turn, will infect another 225 people. The R number is a key factor in gauging the pandemic and refers to the effective ‘reproduction number’ of Covid-19.
“The 225 people would infect 338. In three rounds of infection, the number of people with the virus would have more than quadrupled to 438,” an expert said. This explains why the coronavirus was able to spread at a fast clip among the people, he explained. Experts said an R of less than 1 means that the virus will eventually die down. “The lower the R, the more quickly the virus will peter out. An R of 0.5 means that 100 people would infect only 50, who would infect 25, who would infect 13,” an expert said.
A team of professors from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur and Hyderabad used the ‘susceptible, undetected, tested (positive) and removed approach’ (SUTRA) model to estimate the case load in the country and R values a few days ago, which was published in medRxiv, an Internet site distributing unpublished e-prints on health sciences.
Experts said an R value of 1 is an important threshold to assess the pandemic and its spread. “Though we have not looked at revised numbers of Telangana in the absence of cumulative numbers of districts, the peak case load will be in next 10 days in Telangana,” professor Vidya Sagar, national science chair, IIT-Hyderabad, said. Looking at the numbers made available in the health bulletins, the daily count will be around 8,000 constantly and in next few days about 80,000 cases will be added, he explained.
Experts said an assertive R value will give an idea on how much population is still susceptible to infection. In this scenario, as the cases go up, more number of people will be infected, while the number of vulnerable people will come down.
Though an estimation is not made on the assertive R value, health experts and doctors said much will depend on people and their behaviour. “A face mask is still people’s biggest weapon. Vaccination will take some more time. The more we are disciplined, chances of bringing the R value down are more. The chance of one person infecting another person will come down automatically,” said Dr Kiran Mandal, ICMR-certified researcher.