Omicron Impact in India: Analysis of the Ongoing COVID-19 Third Wave Based on Global Data

  1. Rajesh Ranjan

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Abstract

The Omicron variant of coronavirus has caused major disruptions worldwide with countries struggling to manage the overwhelming number of infections. Omicron is found to be significantly more transmissible compared to its predecessors and therefore almost every impacted country is exhibiting new infection peaks than seen earlier. In this work, we analyze the global statistics of Omicron-impacted countries including South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, and Italy to quantitatively estimate the intensity and severity of recent waves. Next, these statistics are used to estimate the impact of Omicron in India, which is experiencing an intense third wave of COVID-19 since 28 Dec., 2021. The rapid surge in the daily number of infections, comparable to the global trends, strongly suggests the dominance of the Omicron variant in infections in India. The logarithmic regression suggests the early growth rate of infections in this wave is nearly four times that in the second wave. Another notable difference in this wave is the relatively concurrent arrival of outbreaks all across the country; the effective reproduction number (Rt) although has significant variations among different regions. The test positivity rate (TPR) also displays a rapid growth in the last 10 days in several states. Preliminary estimates with the Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model suggest that the peak in India to occur in late January 2022 with a caseload exceeding that in the second wave. Although global Omicron trends, as analyzed in this work, suggest a decline in case fatality rate and hospitalizations compared to Delta, a sudden accumulation of active infections can potentially choke the already stressed healthcare infrastructure for the next few weeks.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2022.01.09.22268969: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Ethicsnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    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).

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    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2022.01.09.22268969v2 on medRxiv
  3. Version published to 10.1101/2022.01.09.22268969v1 on medRxiv