Amidst all the push and pull in the world for concluding with various innovations and technological support when the pandemic has formulated a contexture of fear, uncertainty, and almost lining up disease after disease.
The last few months have proved to be hard for the medical sector, where every other scientifically associated individual is trying to bring forefront something which could reinforce the smooth functioning of the world once again.
So far, specific methods and innovations have not much paved the way towards success, and only social distancing protocols are proving to be of some worth. Meanwhile, IIT Kharagpur, one of India’s most prestigious engineering institutions, has given a new tech concoction wherein a newly developed model by students and a department professor who is a COVID-19 predictive model.
How will this Model help concerning COVID-19?
This COVID-19 Predictive model is a major inventive brilliance of Professor. Abhijit Das from the Computer Science and Development Department of the University. This model is an intendance that could help in available daily counts of infectious cases.
This model, in general, is going to predict the probability of future elevation in the cases of COVID-19. Majorly, identifying the spread of the virus that would help the economy, health sector, and governance pf the officials to work effectively in consideration of the welfare of the country.
The data accustomed to develop the model belongs to the entire country, says the Professor. The data utilized is mainly from the most affected states of the subcontinent inclusive of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Gujrat, West Bengal, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh.
According to an article published in The Economic Times, the Professor, Dr. Abijit Das said,
The model utilizes only the daily infection counts available in the public domain without accessing sensitive information that belongs to the medical records or contact-tracing data for a large fraction of the population. Despite that, the prediction curves show remarkably good fitting with the past data and can be used for future planning.
This model has set a very straight statement mentioning that the pandemic might remain amongst us till the time duration of September-end. The news isn’t very cheerful but has somewhat helped the respective officials to gear up themselves for what is going to come next in this course of conjuncture.
With the invention of this tool- COVID-19 the Professor Dr. Abhijit Das indulged himself in saying that forming new means and measures with the help of this newly built predictive model will be acknowledging the reality, and the concerned officials would be able to reach to a specific solution for this. So that the pandemic doesn’t continue its agony over the humanity
It seems like the IIT’s in India have set their feet to mark their victory over the plague by their scientific-technological instrumentation. The doctors and the engineers are working side by side to generate medical and technological exceptional measures to help people pull out from this unfortunate reality of COVID-19.
The Director of IIT-Kharagpur, Virendra Kumar, believes that although this developed model is still experimental, it helps assist in coming to major decision-making in terms of implementing new policies and helping the Universities in planning out the new academic calendar.
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, on the other hand, has also developed a model, PRACRITI, which stands for (PRediction and Assessment of CoRona Infections and Transmission in India). It is something different from what IIT-Kharagpur has created. PRACRITI is a web-based COVID-19 predicting dashboard predicting the spread and rises in cases state and district wise on the web portal.
The researchers told The Hindu about this tool stating that,
R0 (Reproduction Number) refers to the number of people to whom the disease spreads from a single infected person. Suppose, if an active COVID-19 patient infects two uninfected persons, the R0 value is two. Reduction of R0 is key in controlling and mitigating COVID-19 in India.
All these researches made is ultimately to help out the local and central authorities to take adequate measures and work out a strategy in the public interest. These innovations are likely to give more insights to the civilians and help them become more aware of situations around the world to shield themselves from contracting the disease as much as possible.
