India May Face Fourth COVID-19 Wave From June, Say IIT Researchers

According to researchers from IIT Kanpur, the fourth wave may begin in India around June 22 and continue till October 24.

NEW DELHI — The researchers from the Indian Institue of Technology (IIT) have predicted that India may soon be facing the fourth wave of Covid-19, reported The Times of India.

According to researchers from IIT Kanpur, the fourth wave may begin in India around June 22 and continue till October 24.

However, they also added that the severity of a fourth wave will depend on the emergence of new variants and the vaccination status of people including the administration of a booster dose.

The researchers have said that if the fourth wave of Covid-19 emerges then it may last at least four months. The wave may reach the peak from August 15 to 31 and will decline after that.

This is the third time that researchers from IIT Kanpur have predicted a Covid-19 wave in the country and their predictions about the third wave were nearly on point except for the deviation of only a few days. The statistical prediction has been published on the preprint server MedRxiv on February 24.

Sabara Parshad Rajeshbhai, Subhra Sankar Dhar and Shalabh of the department of mathematics and statistics, IIT Kanpur, conducted this research. The researchers used a statistical model for their prediction and said that the fourth wave in India may arrive after 936 days from the initial data availability date of the Covid-19 outbreak that is January 30, 2020, when the first case in the country was officially registered. So they expect the fourth wave to start from June 22, will reach its peak on August 23 and will end on October 24.

With the use of “Bootstrap” a methodology, they compute the confidence interval of the time point of the peak of a fourth wave. This methodology can also be used to forecast fourth and other waves in other countries as well, they said.

“Many countries have already seen the third wave and a few countries have started to face the fourth and higher waves of the pandemic,” said the researchers.

“The third wave was predicted for India using the concept of a mixture of Gaussian distribution based on the data of Zimbabwe, and when the third wave in India is finishing it is now clear that the forecast was almost correct. Motivated by the study, we investigated the forecasting of the fourth wave in India,” the researchers added.