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In this paper, NeuralProphet (NP), an explainable hybrid modular framework, enhances the forecasting performance of pandemics by adding two neural network modules; auto-regressor (AR) and lagged-regressor (LR). An advanced deep auto-regressor neural network (Deep-AR-Net) model is employed to implement these two modules. The enhanced NP is optimized via AdamW and Huber loss function to perform multivariate multi-step forecasting contrast to Prophet. The models are validated with COVID-19 time-series datasets. The NP's efficiency is studied component-wise for a long-term forecast for India and an overall reduction of 60.36% and individually 34.7% by AR-module, 53.4% by LR-module in MASE compared to Prophet. The Deep-AR-Net model reduces the forecasting error of NP for all five countries, on average, by 49.21% and 46.07% for short-and-long-term, respectively. The visualizations confirm that forecasting curves are closer to the actual cases but significantly different from Prophet. Hence, it can develop a real-time decision-making system for highly infectious diseases., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

India is a hotspot of the COVID-19 crisis. During the first wave, several lockdowns (L) and gradual unlock (UL) phases were implemented by the government of India (GOI) to curb the virus spread. These phases witnessed many challenges and various day-to-day developments such as virus spread and resource management. Twitter, a social media platform, was extensively used by citizens to react to these events and related topics that varied temporally and geographically. Analyzing these variations can be a potent tool for informed decision-making. This paper attempts to capture these spatiotemporal variations of citizen reactions by predicting and analyzing the sentiments of geotagged tweets during L and UL phases. Various sentiment analysis based studies on the related subject have been done; however, its integration with location intelligence for decision making remains a research gap. The sentiments were predicted through a proposed hybrid Deep Learning (DL) model which leverages the strengths of BiLSTM and CNN model classes. The model was trained on a freely available Sentiment140 dataset and was tested over manually annotated COVID-19 related tweets from India. The model classified the tweets with high accuracy of around 90%, and analysis of geotagged tweets during L and UL phases reveal significant geographical variations. The findings as a decision support system can aid in analyzing citizen reactions toward the resources and events during an ongoing pandemic. The system can have various applications such as resource planning, crowd management, policy formulation, vaccination, prompt response, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the absence of an effective vaccine or drug therapy, non-pharmaceutical interventions are the only option for control of the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019, a pandemic with global implications. Each of the over 200 countries affected has followed its own path in dealing with the crisis, making it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of measures implemented, either individually, or collectively. In this paper we analyse the case of the south Indian state of Kerala, which received much attention in the international media for its actions in containing the spread of the disease in the early months of the pandemic, but later succumbed to a second wave. We use a model to study the trajectory of the disease in the state during the first four months of the outbreak. We then use the model for a retrospective analysis of measures taken to combat the spread of the disease, to evaluate their impact. Because of the differences in the trajectory of the outbreak in Kerala, we argue that it is a model worthy of a place in the discussion on how the world might best handle this and other, future, pandemics., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

The Novel Coronavirus which emerged in India on January/30/2020 has become a catastrophe to the country on the basis of health and economy. Due to rapid variations in the transmission of COVID-19, an accurate prediction to determine the long term effects is infeasible. This paper has introduced a nonlinear mathematical model to interpret the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 infection along with providing vaccination in the precedence. To minimize the level of infection and treatment burden, the optimal control strategies are carried out by using the Pontryagin's Maximum Principle. The data validation has been done by correlating the estimated number of infectives with the real data of India for the month of March/2021. Corresponding to the model, the basic reproduction number [Formula: see text] is introduced to understand the transmission dynamics of COVID-19. To justify the significance of parameters we determined the sensitivity analysis of [Formula: see text] using the parameters value. In the numerical simulations, we concluded that reducing [Formula: see text] below unity is not sufficient enough to eradicate the COVID-19 disease and thus, it is required to increase the vaccination rate and its efficacy by motivating individuals to take precautionary measures., (© 2021. The Author(s).)

COVID-19 related restrictions lowered particulate matter and trace gas concentrations across cities around the world, providing a natural opportunity to study effects of anthropogenic activities on emissions of air pollutants. In this paper, the impact of sudden suspension of human activities on air pollution was analyzed by studying the change in satellite retrieved NO 2 concentrations and top-down NOx emission over the urban and rural areas around Delhi. NO 2 was chosen for being the most indicative of emission intensity due to its short lifetime of the order of a few hours in the planetary boundary layer. We present a robust temporal comparison of Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) retrieved NO 2 column density during the lockdown with the counterfactual baseline concentrations, extrapolated from the long-term trend and seasonal cycle components of NO 2 using observations during 2015 to 2019. NO 2 concentration in the urban area of Delhi experienced an anomalous relative change ranging from 60.0% decline during the Phase 1 of lockdown (March 25-April 13, 2020) to 3.4% during the post-lockdown Phase 5. In contrast, we find no substantial reduction in NO 2 concentrations over the rural areas. To segregate the impact of the lockdown from the meteorology, weekly top-down NOx emissions were estimated from high-resolution TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) retrieved NO 2 by accounting for horizontal advection derived from the steady state continuity equation. NOx emissions from urban Delhi and power plants exhibited a mean decline of 72.2% and 53.4% respectively in Phase 1 compared to the pre-lockdown business-as-usual phase. Emission estimates over urban areas and power-plants showed a good correlation with activity reports, suggesting the applicability of this approach for studying emission changes. A higher anomaly in emission estimates suggests that comparison of only concentration change, without accounting for the dynamical and photochemical conditions, may mislead evaluation of lockdown impact. Our results shall also have a broader impact for optimizing bottom-up emission inventories.

COVID-19 is a global crisis where India is going to be one of the most heavily affected countries. The variability in the distribution of COVID-19-related health outcomes might be related to many underlying variables, including demographic, socioeconomic, or environmental pollution related factors. The global and local models can be utilized to explore such relations. In this study, ordinary least square (global) and geographically weighted regression (local) methods are employed to explore the geographical relationships between COVID-19 deaths and different driving factors. It is also investigated whether geographical heterogeneity exists in the relationships. More specifically, in this paper, the geographical pattern of COVID-19 deaths and its relationships with different potential driving factors in India are investigated and analysed. Here, better knowledge and insights into geographical targeting of intervention against the COVID-19 pandemic can be generated by investigating the heterogeneity of spatial relationships. The results show that the local method (geographically weighted regression) generates better performance ([Formula: see text]) with smaller Akaike Information Criterion (AICc [Formula: see text]) as compared to the global method (ordinary least square). The GWR method also comes up with lower spatial autocorrelation (Moran's [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text]) in the residuals. It is found that more than 86% of local [Formula: see text] values are larger than 0.60 and almost 68% of [Formula: see text] values are within the range 0.80-0.97. Moreover, some interesting local variations in the relationships are also found.

Assessing the impact of lockdowns on COVID-19 incidence may provide important lessons for management of pandemic in resource-limited settings. We examined growth of incident confirmed COVID-19 patients before, during and after lockdowns during the first wave in Pune city that reported the largest COVID-19 burden at the peak of the pandemic. Using anonymized individual-level data captured by Pune's public health surveillance program between February 1st and September 15th 2020, we assessed weekly incident COVID-19 patients, infection rates, and epidemic curves by lockdown status (overall and by sex, age, and population density) and modelled the natural epidemic using the compartmental model. Effect of lockdown on incident patients was assessed using multilevel Poisson regression. We used geospatial mapping to characterize regional spread. Of 241,629 persons tested for SARS-CoV-2, 64,526 (26%) were positive, contributing to an overall rate of COVID-19 disease of 267·0 (95% CI 265·3–268·8) per 1000 persons. The median age of COVID-19 patients was 36 (interquartile range [IQR] 25–50) years, 36,180 (56%) were male, and 9414 (15%) were children < 18 years. Epidemic curves and geospatial mapping showed delayed peak of the patients by approximately 8 weeks during the lockdowns as compared to modelled natural epidemic. Compared to a subsequent unlocking period, incident COVID-19 patients were 43% lower (IRR 0·57, 95% CI 0·53–0·62) during India's nationwide lockdown and were 22% lower (IRR 0·78, 95% CI 0.73–0.84) during Pune's regional lockdown and was uniform across age groups and population densities. Both national and regional lockdowns slowed the COVID-19 infection rates in population dense, urban region in India, underscoring its impact on COVID-19 control efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dehydration of the upper airways increases risks of respiratory diseases from COVID-19 to asthma and COPD. We find in human volunteer studies involving 464 human subjects in Germany, the US, and India that respiratory droplet generation increases by up to 4 orders of magnitude in dehydration-associated states of advanced age (n = 357), elevated BMI-age (n = 148), strenuous exercise (n = 20) and SARS-CoV-2 infection (n = 87), and falls with hydration of the nose, larynx and trachea by calcium-rich hypertonic salts. We also find in a protocol of exercise-induced airway dehydration that hydration of the airways by calcium-rich salts increases oxygenation relative to a non-treatment control (P < 0.05). In a random control study of COVID-19 positive subjects (n = 40), thrice-a-day delivery of the calcium-rich hypertonic salts (active) suppressed respiratory droplet generation by 51% ± 11% and increased oxygen saturation over three days of treatment by 48.08% ± 9.61% (P < 0.001), while no changes were observed in the nasal-saline control group. Self-reported symptoms significantly declined in the active group and did not decline in the control group. Hydration of the upper airways appears promising as a non-drug approach for reducing risks of respiratory diseases such as COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has affected all countries. Its containment represents a unique challenge for India due to a large population (> 1.38 billion) across a wide range of population densities. Assessment of the COVID-19 disease burden is required to put the disease impact into context and support future pandemic policy development. Here, we present the national-level burden of COVID-19 in India in 2020 that accounts for differences across urban and rural regions and across age groups. Input data were collected from official records or published literature. The proportion of excess COVID-19 deaths was estimated using the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Washington data. Disability-adjusted life years (DALY) due to COVID-19 were estimated in the Indian population in 2020, comprised of years of life lost (YLL) and years lived with disability (YLD). YLL was estimated by multiplying the number of deaths due to COVID-19 by the residual standard life expectancy at the age of death due to the disease. YLD was calculated as a product of the number of incident cases of COVID-19, disease duration and disability weight. Scenario analyses were conducted to account for excess deaths not recorded in the official data and for reported COVID-19 deaths. The direct impact of COVID-19 in 2020 in India was responsible for 14,100,422 (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 14,030,129–14,213,231) DALYs, consisting of 99.2% (95% UI 98.47–99.64%) YLLs and 0.80% (95% UI 0.36–1.53) YLDs. DALYs were higher in urban (56%; 95% UI 56–57%) than rural areas (44%; 95% UI 43.4–43.6) and in men (64%) than women (36%). In absolute terms, the highest DALYs occurred in the 51–60-year-old age group (28%) but the highest DALYs per 100,000 persons were estimated for the 71–80 years old age group (5481; 95% UI 5464–5500 years). There were 4,815,908 (95% UI 4,760,908–4,924,307) DALYs after considering reported COVID-19 deaths only. The DALY estimations have direct and immediate implications not only for public policy in India, but also internationally given that India represents one sixth of the world's population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to develop an assumption-free data-driven model to accurately forecast COVID-19 spread. Towards this end, we firstly employed Bayesian optimization to tune the Gaussian process regression (GPR) hyperparameters to develop an efficient GPR-based model for forecasting the recovered and confirmed COVID-19 cases in two highly impacted countries, India and Brazil. However, machine learning models do not consider the time dependency in the COVID-19 data series. Here, dynamic information has been taken into account to alleviate this limitation by introducing lagged measurements in constructing the investigated machine learning models. Additionally, we assessed the contribution of the incorporated features to the COVID-19 prediction using the Random Forest algorithm. Results reveal that significant improvement can be obtained using the proposed dynamic machine learning models. In addition, the results highlighted the superior performance of the dynamic GPR compared to the other models (i.e., Support vector regression, Boosted trees, Bagged trees, Decision tree, Random Forest, and XGBoost) by achieving an averaged mean absolute percentage error of around 0.1%. Finally, we provided the confidence level of the predicted results based on the dynamic GPR model and showed that the predictions are within the 95% confidence interval. This study presents a promising shallow and simple approach for predicting COVID-19 spread. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]