India may have over 7 million corona cases by October, become No. 1 in tally

Hyderabad: India may witness over seven million COVID-19 cases by the first week of October, surpassing the US and emerging as the country with highest number of infections, a team of researchers from BITS Hyderabad said Friday.

As per data released by the Union Health Ministry data on Friday, the number of coronavirus cases in India breached the 45 lakh mark while data released by a national public health institute in the US said the number of infections in that country crossed six million as of September 8.

The team has been engaged in forecasting the COVID-19 pandemic in India using advanced statistical learning techniques, lead researcher Dr T S L Radhika of the Department of Applied Mathematics, BITS Hyderabad said.

The team recently communicated its findings to the 'International Journal of Infectious Diseases' published by Elsevier.

"Our results, obtained using a model based on statistical learning techniques applied to the existing data, indicate that India is likely to become the top COVID-19 country in the world, surpassing the US by about the first week of October. The total number of cases is also likely to cross the 70 lakh mark by this time. The figure however is contingent on the number of tests being carried out," Dr Radhika said in an email communication to PTI.

The researchers are now working on refining their model based on advanced machine learning techniques to make predictions for the longer term, the researcher added.