Forecasters warn that COVID deaths may double in the coming days

NEW DELHI: The second wave of COVID-19, which took the whole country into the world’s biggest health crisis, has the potential to worsen again in the coming weeks. Researchers predicted that the death toll in the country can double from the current levels. The projections are made by a team at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, which used a mathematical model to predict that over 4 lakh deaths will occur by mid-June if the current trend continues.

The statistics related to the novel coronavirus are hard to predict, especially in a sprawling country like India, but forecasters have suggested the urgent requirement for the country to expand its public health measures such as testing and social distancing. India could suffer the world’s biggest COVID-19 death toll even if the worst estimates are avoided.

Ashish Jha, Dean, Brown University School of Public Health, said that the next four to six weeks are going to be very difficult for India. He added that the challenge now is to contain the crisis and make this period decrease to four weeks, if possible. He added that the main metric that officials are analysing is the test positivity rate which is the percentage of people with positive results. The overall positivity rate of the country is around 20 per cent which tops to 40 per cent in some areas. World Health Organisation (WHO) considers anything above 5 per cent to be high and suggests that governments should implement social distancing norms until this is below 5 per cent for at least two weeks.