Analysis of the Second COVID-19 Wave in India and the United Kingdom Using a Birth-Death Model

  1. Narayanan C. Viswanath

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Abstract

Several countries have witnessed multiple waves of the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 21. The method in [8] is applied here to analyze the COVID-19 waves in India and the UK. For this, a birth-death model is fitted to the active and total cases data for 30 days periods called windows starting from 16 th March 2020 up to 10 th May 2021. Peculiarities of the parameters suggested a classification of the above windows into three categories: (i) whose fitted parameters predicted a rise in the number of active cases before a fall to zero, (ii) which predicted a decrease, without rising, in the active cases to zero and (iii) which predicted an increase in the active cases until the entire susceptible population gets infected. It follows that some of the type (iii) windows are of the same or lesser concern when compared to some type (i) windows. Further analysis of the type (iii) windows leads to the identification of those which could be indicators of the start of a new wave of the pandemic. The study thus proposes a method for using the present data for identifying pandemic waves in the near future.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.06.16.21259009: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Fitting is done by applying the Levenberg-Marquardt nonlinear least-squares algorithm [6] using MATLAB R2019b [5] software.
    MATLAB
    suggested: (MATLAB, RRID:SCR_001622)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.06.16.21259009v1 on medRxiv