Impact of intervention on the spread of COVID-19 in India: A model based study

Abstract

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by the virus severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has already created emergency situations in almost every country of the world. The disease spreads all over the world within a very short period of time after its first identification in Wuhan, China in December, 2019. In India, the outbreak, starts on March, 2020 and after that the cases are increasing exponentially. Very high population density, the unavailability of specific medicines or vaccines, insufficient evidences regarding the transmission mechanism of the disease also make it more difficult to fight against the disease properly in India. Mathematical models have been used to predict the disease dynamics and also to assess the efficiency of the intervention strategies in reducing the disease burden. In this work, we propose a mathematical model to describe the disease transmission mechanism between the individuals. Our proposed model is fitted to the daily new reported cases in India during the period March, 2020 to November, 2020. We estimate the basic reproduction number, effective reproduction number and epidemic doubling time from the incidence data for the above-mentioned period. We further assess the effect of implementing preventive measures in reducing the new cases. Our model projects the daily new COVID-19 cases in India during November, 2020 to February, 2021 for a range of intervention strength. We also investigate that higher intervention effort is required to control the disease outbreak within a shorter period of time in India. Moreover, our analysis reveals that the strength of the intervention should be increased over the time to eradicate the disease effectively.