Omicron may trigger 3rd wave, could peak by February 3: IIT-K study

HYDERABAD: Researchers at IIT Kanpur have predicted that a third wave, which may be triggered by the Omicron variant of the Covid-19 virus, may peak in India by February 3.“Following the trends around the world, this project report forecasts India’s third wave to start around mid-December and peak in the beginning of February,” the report, published in online preprint server MedRxiv, said. The team used a statistical tool called the Gaussian Mixture model to predict the third wave in India. The research report used the data of the first and second waves in India, and the current rise in cases triggered by Omicron in various countries, to predict a possible third wave in the country.The researchers said the study “suggests the cases reach peak value after 735 days from our initial observation date, which is January 30, 2020, when India reported its first official case of Covid-19. So, the cases start rising around December 15, 2021, and the peak of the third wave will occur on Thursday, February 3, 2022”. The research team, drawn from the department of mathematics and statistics, IIT Kanpur, comprises Sabara Parshad Rajeshbhai, Subhra Sankar Dhar and Shalabh.The researchers said the key question after the first and second waves of Covid-19 was “will the third wave also arrive and, if yes, then when”. To unravel the puzzle the team used a statistical method based on the fitting of a mixture of Gaussian distributions. “After plotting the daily cases per million of all other countries and matching the graphs with India, the top 10 countries with the best match were chosen as a training dataset. The top 10 countries are: US, UK, Germany, France, South Africa, Russia, Israel, Spain, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Zambia and Zimbabwe are the closest matching countries for which the daily cases data follow very similar patterns to India’s,” the researchers said.