For over four months, India has been in the grips of a pandemic that has uprooted the livelihoods of millions, while devastating an economy that had, after long last, seemed to have bottomed out, finally exhibiting modest signs of recovery. From our current vantage point, amid all the uncertainty, there is one question that stands above all, begging for an answer – when will the outbreak end, and when can India expect to return to some semblance of normalcy?

According to the latest projections put together by Protiviti and Times Now, India is currently looking at a peak active case count, as per the average of all the three models used, of 6,45,700, expected to arrive some time during the latter half of August. 

The SEIR model predicts India’s active case peak to be around 6,45,700, around the same time. The Hybrid model though, projects India’s peak to be in the region of 6,56,203 active cases by mid-August. Following India’s peak, daily active case counts will gradually begin to plummet, reflecting the fact that India has put the worst behind it, and will, finally be on its way towards eradicating the virus completely. From a national standpoint, our projections show that the number of active cases in the country will drop to below 22,000 by mid-October. 

On June 16, the India Outbreak Report had predicted that India’s active case count would peak near the 260,000 mark, with the epidemic within the country, effectively, coming to an end by mid-September. So what changed over the last 3 weeks? 

Essentially, our analysis indicates that the peak has been pushed back by approximately 40 days owing to the aggressive unwinding of lockdowns across states. With the economy in tatters, India has, perhaps, moved hastily in relaxing its mobility restrictions which has, undoubtedly, contributed significantly to the rise in the number of infections witnessed – especially within the country’s metros. 

Secondly, there are growing concerns that ,with the conclusion of lockdowns, many have abandoned safety protocols issued by health authorities, most notably that of social distancing – proven to be one of the most effective strategies to curb the spread of the virus. A continued failure to practise social distancing could very well skew India’s coronavirus curve further to the right and upwards, yielding a higher peak, and more distant end date. 

“What they do, they wear a mask under the nose, which is totally ineffective. When they are talking to somebody, they pull it down. That’s the time when you really need to keep it up. So this message of the new norm that we keep talking about has not gone through, and I think that we still need to keep doing it,” said Dr Naresh Trehan, Chairman & MD, Medanta, in conversation with Times Now’s Rahul Shivshankar and Navika Kumar.

Another alarming metric is India’s mortality rate. As it stands, India has a death rate of around 2.6 per cent, as per our calculations – markedly higher than the global average death rate of just 0.9 per cent. Crucially, this raises a number of questions of whether the nation’s already overburdened healthcare infrastructure could buckle under the weight of the new cases expected to be recorded over the next four to five weeks. 

Keeping this in mind, India’s focus must be to reduce its transmission rate (R0) which, as of July 7, stood at 1.67. An R0 of under 1 would mean that case counts will no longer be rising day-on-day, as witnessed in a number of European countries such as Italy and Spain.