No abstract

There is a new public health catastrophe forbidding the world. With the advent and spread of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). Learning from the experiences of various countries and the World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines, social distancing, use of sanitizers, thermal screening, quarantining, and provision of lockdown in the cities being the effective measure that can contain the spread of the pandemic. Though complete lockdown helps in containing the spread, it generates complexity by breaking the economic activity chain. Besides, laborers, farmers, and workers may lose their daily earnings. Owing to these detrimental effects, the government has to open the lockdown strategically. Prediction of the COVID-19 spread and analyzing when the cases would stop increasing helps in developing a strategy. An attempt is made in this paper to predict the time after which the number of new cases stops rising, considering the strong implementation of lockdown conditions using three different techniques such as Decision Tree, Support Vector Machine, and Gaussian Process Regression algorithm are used to project the number of cases. Thus, the projections are used in identifying inflection points, which would help in planning the easing of lockdown in a few of the areas strategically. The criticality in a region is evaluated using the criticality index (CI), which is proposed by authors in one of the past of research works. This research work is made available in a dashboard to enable the decision-makers to combat the pandemic.

PurposeThere are several methods developed in the recent past to predict the spread of COVID-19 in different countries. However, due to changing scenarios in terms of interaction among people, none could predict the case close to the actual figures. An attempt to simulate people's interaction due to economic reopening concerning the confirmed cases at various places as per changing situation has been made. The scenario development method's base lies in the hypothesis that if there were no inter-state transportation during India's lockdown after May 24th, the number of infection cases would have started lowering down in a normalized progression.Design/methodology/approachThis study has developed three scenarios from the worst to the business-as-usual to the best in order to project the COVID-19 infections in India concerning infections observed from January 30th till May 24th, 2020, since the domestic flights became operational from May 25th, 2020, in India.FindingsBased on the observed cases till May 24th, the rise of cases is projected further in a random progression and superimposed to the normal progression. The results obtained in the three scenarios present that worst case needs complete lockdown, business-as-usual case needs regulatory lockdown and best case assures complete lockdown release by the second week of September 2020. This study suggests the preparedness and mitigation strategy for a threefold lockdown management scheme in all-inclusive.Originality/valueThe work has been done on a hypothesis which is solely original.

No abstract