Cambridge tracker predicts Covid decline by May 23

New Delhi: A new tracker by Cambridge Judge Business School forecasts that the number of new Covid cases in India has peaked, and will see a declining trend over the two-week forecast period to 23 May.

The tracker said but there is substantial variation among States and Union Territories in their trajectories. Cases will continue to increase over the next two weeks in Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Odisha, Puducherry, Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Tripura.

A new CJBS Covid-19 Tracker for India, developed by Cambridge Judge Business School and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in India working with Health Systems Transformation Platform in India, provides forecasts of the pandemic's trajectory based on a recently developed model.

These forecasts are based on a structural time series model that uses historical data in estimation, but adapts to the trend emerging in the most recent period.

The model is described in a paper in Harvard Data Science Review by Andrew Harvey, Emeritus Professor of Econometrics at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Cambridge, and Paul Kattuman, Reader in Economics at Cambridge Judge Business School, entitled "Time series models based on growth curves with applications to forecasting coronavirus".