SARS-COV-2 Pandemic: Understanding the Impact of Lockdown in the Most Affected States of India

SARS-COV-2 has stopped the world in its footsteps and a third of the population has been forced to stay at home. Here we present a comparative study of the performance of states of India, in curbing the spread of the disease, that are most affected by the pandemic. We have done so based on the data collected between 14th March, 2020 to 17th April, 2020. We do this by comparing the smoothened time series and percentage changes along with change point detection of the daily confirmed cases. We also discuss the different policies and strategies adopted by the states in curbing the disease and the ground level implementation. We have developed ARIMA(p,d,q) models where (p,d,q) are obtained by minimising the AIK(Akaike Information Criterion). These models are used to make forecasts for the country which show that by 7th May, 2020, India would have around 50,237 confirmed cases and a doubling rate of 11 days. On the basis of the performance, of each state, we argue that a local level strategy which is based on the demographics of that particular region be developed instead of a central and uniform one.