China is currently facing the most severe outbreak of Covid 19, even as it is entering the third year of the pandemic. While in most countries of the world, cases are on a decline, China is making and breaking its own records of the highest Covid cases. As per China's National Health Commission, the country had only 12,650 active Covid cases as of December 31, 2021, but as soon as 2022 commenced, an outbreak unfolded in China, yet again.
And today, as the pandemic has completed more than two years, China has 646,700 active Covid cases (March 11 data). Around the same time two years back, India first started to detect Covid cases. As China faces another outbreak, and a string of lockdowns, should India be worried about a potential fourth wave of Covid 19?
IIT Kanpur study predicts fourth wave in India
Some time back, an IIT Kanpur study of coronavirus, predicted that India will see a fourth wave of the pandemic that may start around June 22 and peak from mid to late August this year. The yet-to-be peer-reviewed study, recently posted on the preprint repository MedRxiv, used a statistical model to make the prediction, finding that the possible new wave will last for four months.
"The data indicates that the fourth wave of COVID-19 in India will arrive after 936 days from the initial data availability date, which is January 30, 2020," the authors of the study said.
"Therefore, the fourth wave starts from June 22, 2022, reaching its peak on August 23, 2022, and ends on October 24, 2022," they wrote in the research paper.
However, the researchers noted that there is always a fair chance that a possible new variant of coronavirus may have an intense impact on the whole analysis.
Scientists, Govt question IIT Kanpur's prediction
As the research paper by IIT Kanpur got published, it saw several critics of the theory posited in it. Scienstists questioned it saying it is at best a guesswork. Forecasting models are good only for short-term projections and an IIT-Kanpur study predicting a fourth Covid wave in India in June may at best be “data astronomy" and guesswork, several scientists told news agency PTI.
Using a similar approach, the government said that it looks at such studies with due respect but it is yet to examine whether this particular report has a scientific worth or not.
Does vaccination have a role to play?
The scientists who questioned the theory also did so taking India's vaccination coverage into consideration. Dispelling fears of another spike in cases in the next three months, they also took note of the fact that most people in India have had two vaccines and one natural infection. So even if there is a wave, the consequences in terms of hospitalization and deaths should be manageable unless there is a new variant. Even during the third wave, India wasn't as badly affected as it was during the first two waves when vaccination hadn't begun in the country.
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