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Background: COVID-19 is an emerging infectious disease which has been declared a Pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on March 11 2020. This pandemic has spread over the world in more than 200 countries. India is also adversely affected by this pandemic, and there are no signs of slowing down of the virus in coming time. The absence of a vaccine for COVID-19 is making the situation worse for the already overstretched Indian public health care system. Objective: This study is forecasting the confirmed and active cases for COVID-19 until June, using time series ARIMA model. In further analysis, based on predicted active cases, we estimated the requirement of isolation beds, ICU beds and ventilators for COVID-19 patients until June. Methods: We used ARIMA model, and Auto ARIMA model for forecasting confirmed and active cases till the end of June month using time series data of COVID-19 cases in India from March 14, 2020, to May 3 2020. We estimated requirement of ICU beds as 10%, Ventilators as 5% and isolation beds as 85% of the active cases predicted from our calculations. Results: We expect that India will be having 441896 confirmed cases (95% CI: 210240, 673552), 124712 active cases (95% CI: 68481, 180944) at the end of June based on our forecasts. Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat and Delhi (UT) will be the most affected states, having the highest number of active and confirmed cases at the end of June while Kerala is expected to have less than 1000 confirmed cases and no active cases at the end of June. We expect that India has to prepare 106006 isolation beds (95% CI: 58209, 153802), 12471 ICU beds (95% CI: 6848,18094) and 6236 ventilators (95% CI: 3424,9047) to accommodate the patients at the end of June. Discussion and Conclusion: Our forecasts show a very alarming situation for India in coming days and, the actual numbers can go higher than our estimates of confirmed cases as India is observing partial lockdown currently. In future, lockdown might be lifted, and in that case, there will be a surge in the number of daily confirmed and active cases. The requirement of isolation beds, ICUs and ventilators will also be increased in that scenario. Migrants returning to their homes due to loss of livelihood and income in the lockdown period may lead to a rise in the number of cases, which could not be accounted for in our projections. We suggest a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model in the health sector to accommodate COVID-19 patients adequately and reduce the burden of the already overstretched Indian public health care system. |
