New Delhi : IIT Madras has come with a preliminary study that suggests that the current wave of the COVID-19 infection in the country is expected to peak in the next 14 days.

The analysis is based on interpretation of India's R-value which indicates how rapidly COVID-19 is spreading, has further reduced to 1.57 in the week from January 14 to 21.

R-value indicates the number of people an infected person can transmit the virus to.

The R-value was recorded at 1.57 between January 14 and January 21 while the number was recorded at 2.2 in the week between January 7-13 and at 4 from January 1-6 and at 2.9 from December 25- 31 last year, PTI reported, citing the analysis.

The R-value of Mumbai and Kolkata indicates that peak is over there, and it is becoming endemic while for Delhi and Chennai it is still close to 1. The reason for that could be that as per the new ICMR guidelines they have removed the requirement for contact tracing and therefore there are less infections as earlier said Dr Jayant Jha, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics, IIT Madras to PTI.

The preliminary study was conducted by computational modeling by IIT Madras' Department of Mathematics and Centre of Excellence for Computational Mathematics and Data Science headed by Prof Neelesh S Upadhye and Prof S Sundar.
-PTI