India may witness an unprecedented surge of coronavirus cases, and report 2.87 lakh cases per day by the winter of 2021 if a vaccine is not out, caution researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
A study carried out by researchers Hazhir Rahmandad, TY Lim, and John Sterman of MIT's Sloan School of Management put out harrowing figures related to the coronavirus pandemic.
The study speculated that the world would register around 249 million Covid-19 cases and would report 1.8 million deaths by March 2021 if there is no vaccine in place.
According to the study, the top 10 countries that will be affected by coronavirus, as determined by the daily infection rates, at the end of winter 2021 are India, the US, South Africa, Iran, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, France, and Germany.
However, India will surpass the US to become the worst-affected country by the coronavirus. The US may report 95,000 cases per day followed by South Africa (21,000 cases) Iran (17,000 cases), and Indonesia (13,000 cases) at the end of winter 2021.
The MIT researchers also said that infections are 12 times higher and deaths 50 per cent higher than previously reported.
“While actual cases are far greater than official reports suggest, the majority of people remain susceptible. Waiting for herd immunity is not a viable path out of the current pandemic,” Rahmandad told media.
“In this paper, we build and estimate a multi-country model of the Covid-19 pandemic at a global scale,” the authors wrote, as cited in media reports.
The study was based on a multi-country modified SEIR (Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, Recovered) model, a standard mathematical model for infectious diseases used by epidemiologists. This helped the researchers to simultaneously analyse the spread of the contagion across 84 countries in the world.
“Our model captures transmission dynamics for the disease, as well as how, at the country level, transmission rates vary in response to risk perception and weather, testing rates condition infection and death data, and fatality rates depend on demographics and hospitalization,” they explained.
“Every community needs to keep the pandemic under control until a vaccine or treatment is widely available. A slow and half-hearted response only increases the human costs without offering much of an upside in terms of economic output,” Rahmandad noted.
Globally there have been 11,669,259 confirmed cases of Covid-19, including 539,906 deaths, reported to WHO on the evening of July 8.