Super growth phase of Covid in India likely on the wane

The current "super exponential growth phase" of Covid-19 has started to wane in a number of states and union territories in India, according to the latest tracker published by the University of Cambridge's Judge Business School.

"The filtered daily growth rate of cases at the national level has now plateaued at 34.9%," the report said, while the latest reproduction number (the average number of people an infected individual will pass on the virus to) for India on January 9 stood at 4.03. The 'filtered daily growth' method used by the tracker filters out day-of-the-week effects and random noise to reveal the underlying signal, the authors explain.

While the experience of other countries shows that the decline in daily growth rate will likely be erratic depending on social behaviour and mitigation measures, trends show that daily cases are likely to peak around the end of January in Delhi, with the daily growth rate declining to 36% after peaking at 53% on January 5.


Paul Kattuman, professor of economics at Judge Business School, who is working on the tracker, had earlier told ET that the cases will accelerate in proportion to the change in reproduction number, "which is expected to be steep when a wave led by Omicron is building up. Deceleration will be sharp."

Though there are 34 states with reproduction number over 1.2, daily growth rates have peaked and are declining in "Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Jharkhand and West Bengal", the report shared with ET said.