Abandoning lockdown, India’s coronavirus cases may reach 800,000 in a month: Study

NEW DELHI: After giving up on a costly lockdown, India’s coronavirus outbreak is projected to nearly triple by July 15 to over 800,000 cases as its leaders tell citizens to ‘learn to live with the virus’.

The forecast from a team of data scientists at the University of Michigan would put India just below Brazil, the world’s second worst-hit country at present, and on track to surpass the Latin American country given its massive population of 1.3 billion people and the ongoing relaxation of containment measures.

“You cannot see the peak, it’s been pushed further in time,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Michigan who is part of the team that’s modeling India’s pandemic. She removed longer term projections from the team’s website because they were causing people to panic. “I wish I could be more positive but I think it’s going to be really hard over the next couple of months.”

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India tried a nationwide lockdown at the end of March, at a relatively early stage of its detected outbreak. While the measures arguably slowed transmission somewhat, the