India: Unlock 1.0 too soon?
With almost the entire country about to return to normalcy after more than 2 months of being in lockdown, I wanted to take a look back at how we handled the crisis and if opening up the country now is the right move. I heavily draw from this article by Tomas Pueyo on Medium and this video by Abacaba so do check them out for more information.
Also, special thanks to Co-learning Lounge for coming up with the project of using public data and leveraging technology (D3.js) to show interactive visualization where I got a chance to work with Sai Kiran, Lokesh Kotha and Yogesh Kothiya. Checkout the projects we are working on here.
With Italy, Iran and China struggling to contain the virus, India found itself is a position where it had a 2 week head start and practically had its citizen’s lives in its own hands. Given that we had among the lowest beds per capita, we had to make a decision quick.
On 25th March 2020 a complete lockdown of the country was announced to help flatten the curve and avoid becoming the next Italy. Activities like clapping from the balcony and lighting diyas were announced to keep everyone’s morale up and also show solidarity to the healthcare workers and the police.
Keeping 1.3 Billion people in their homes was not easy, especially when it doesn’t look as bad on paper. In addition to that, a lot of migrant workers lost their livelihood within a few hours and were stuck far away from their homes without any means available to get there. A lot of other challenges also came up as the days in lockdown started to pile up.
To see where we stand now and if removing the restrictions was a good move, we need to see how many actual cases or COVID-19 patients are there at the moment. To achieve this I used Hubei, China’s data which had 2 data points, one with the reported cases and the other is the actual date of contraction of the virus. They achieved this by asking the patients when they started showing symptoms.
For a country to be able to decide if they should enter a lockdown or exit it, they need the data in blue which is the actual number of covid-19 patients in the country right now, but not all countries have this data. The only thing we can do is estimate the blue graph for India to help paint a better picture.
Assumptions
- Incubation period of the virus is 2–14 days
- Tests take 2 days to show results
- The 2–14 day range is a normal distribution N(10, 3); Mean: 3; SD: 2;
Data is taken from : covid19india’s API
Estimated Actual Contraction dates
Will all the above assumptions, I got the following graph for Hubei, China.
The blue estimated line matches very closely with the official document, so I decided to try the same model on India’s reported cases to see if we can find anything interesting.
Applying the same model to India’s data gives us the following plot.
The estimation line stops 14 days before the last reported case for obvious reasons (Don’t have enough data for the remaining 14 days to predict accurately). The last reported date on this plot is June 1st 2020 the first day of the phased reopening plan of the country.
The cases seem to raise at a steady rate and with this plot alone, reopening the country seems like a bad idea.
EAC Growth Rates
Growth rate is the rate at which the virus is spreading. It is calculated by dividing current day’s estimated actual cases to the previous day’s estimated actual cases. Eg: we have 7000 EAC as of 4th June and we had 6900 EAS on 3rd June so the growth rate on 4th June will be 7000/6900 which is 1.01.
Growth Rate distribution:
- GR > 1 means an exponential raise in reported cases
- GR =1 means the same number of reported cases in each day
- GR < 1 means that the virus is infecting less and less number of people each day and eventually dies out.
Hubei, China’s Growth rate looks like the following
We can clearly see that as the virus dies out, the growth rate also reaches below 1. This means that the country is well on their way to eliminate the virus. With this kind of a growth rate, the government can start to open up the country with all the necessary precautions.
India’s growth rate is as follows.
The lockdown does seem to have a positive impact on the growth rate. It stays almost the same for a long time before finally reaching below 1 on may 21st which is the last point that could accurately be estimated at the time of writing this article.
If the line is below 1, then it’s a good that that we are reopening right?
Wrong!
Our growth rate is 0.92, which is barely below 1 and if the same rate continues for 2 weeks, we’ll have more than 1 Lakh cases and if the same continues for a year, we’ll have more than 26 Lakh cases of COVID-19 patients in India. (This is just an example, exponential growth obviously doesn’t work like that, but hope I got the point across).
So the aim is to get the growth rate well below 1 and make it stay below 1 for long enough that we can eliminate the virus from the country.
My opinion
With all the above data suggesting that reopening the country at this point is a bad idea, why are we still doing it?
Remember the migrant workers? they have been without work and pay for almost 2 months now, and so have all the other daily wage earners and shop owners. Extending the lockdown any longer would have had a detrimental effect on the poorer sections of the society. The economy was also in a pretty bad state even before the crisis hit and it only went downhill from there.
The reasons above and some other factors influenced the government’s decision to open up the country even if the growth rate is not well below 1.
These relaxation will surely have an impact on the numbers reported by the country, we need to wait and see if the growth rate stays below 1 or jumps above it. Also if the reported cases raise, then it means that we are conducting a good number of tests, which is a good thing because it helps us identify the most vulnerable parts of the country.
With all this happening around us, it might be daunting, and it surely is, but we need to remember to focus on the things we can control, in this case we control if we maintain proper hygiene, follow social distancing rules and wear masks in public places. If we all follow these, we can contain the virus even if the country is reopened with no restrictions as we give the virus little chance to spread.
We are all in this together.
Stay safe and maintain proper hygiene!
Cheers.
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