Covid-19 Modelling


Honorary Professor M Vidyasagar from IIT Hyderabad, along with Prof Manindra Agarwal from IIT-K and Deputy Chief Madhuri Kanitkar from the Integrated Defense Staff, have been working on a SUTRA model for charting the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country. They have been working closely with the government and making significant predictions related to the pandemic.

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (IIT-H) have also developed a model that can help the government and administrators predict the Covid-19 trends. Prof. Mohan Raghavan, an assistant professor in the departments of biomedical engineering and artificial intelligence, and the lead researcher believes that this will help the government make better sense of the data of active and recorded cases, by understanding the contributions of the mitigation measures, and new external factors. The model captures the active cases as a function of administrative response, and thus, allows better planning and allocation of resources. Prof. Kousik Sarathy, also associated with the study, believes that it can also help to estimate the effort required for achieving a level of contact tracing, and help the government understand the impact of its policies. The model is only not able to explain short-term effects, but can also provide intuitive connections between observed trends and underlying changing parameters.