A SIMPLE METHOD FOR DETECTING EARLY SIGNAL IN NATURE OF PROGRESSION OF COVID-19 IN INDIAN POPULATION

COVID-19 (SARS-Cov-2) is spreading around the globe in a highly contagious manner. China has shown the way to halt the progression of the disease by totally sealing Wuhan from rest of china but they could not prevent community spread resulting in more than 4000 deaths in a short period of time. India, following example of china, ordered national Lockdown early on 23 March, 2020. But it is difficult to determine the transition Here we have changed the way we look at available data to detect an early onset of the effect of Lockdown. Here a simple method is described for the first time to determine at the earliest when a change is beginning to take effect after Lockdown on the progression/regression of the spread of novel COVID-19 virus which could help to frame strategy for intervention to prevent community spread and save lives.


INTRODUCTION
The nCOVID-19 is a novel corona virus having its origin in Wuhan district of China in December 2019. Its spread in china and rest of the world has caused mayhem during the last 3 months all over the world bringing the entire world to its knees. Until date there is no vaccine or therapeutic agent developed against this highly infectious virus that spreads through human contact. That makes it imperative to work on prevention of its spread.
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses, including those that cause "the common cold" in healthy humans. These viruses account for up to 30 percent of upper respiratory tract infections in adults. This outbreak of COVID-19 marks the third time in recent years and has emerged to cause severe disease and death in the human population.
The new coronavirus , is closely related to SARS, and its characteristic feature is long latency period before the typical flu-like fever, cough, and shortness of breath manifest. The people infected with this virus may not show any symptoms for up to two weeks, allowing them to pass it on to others in the meantime. This time the virus started its journey in Wuhan, China and spread like wild fire and took thousands of lives.
Overwhelmed by the enormity of the disaster even WHO/UN along with China downplayed the spread of virus through human contact when it was brought to their notice in December by a group in Taiwan. As a result, the novel Corona virus was able to easily spread all over the world through international flights and lack of monitoring for the early virus-symptoms at the point of entry.

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The recent disaster has prompted a massive global effort to contain and slow its spread. Despite those efforts, over the last month the virus has begun circulating outside of China in multiple countries and territories and India happens to be one of them. However, the silver lining is China was able to contain the virus within Wuhan by cutting the chain and isolating people with COVID-19 and identifying & isolating those with possible exposure.
At present it is ravaging the entire western world and gradually getting a hold in the eastern hemisphere. According to the Centre for Disease Control, CDC, NIH, USA, it may be possible to contract the virus responsible for the current outbreak, COVD-19/SARS-CoV-2, by touching a surface or object with the virus on it and then touching your face. However, COVD-19/SARS-CoV-2 is believed to mostly spread from person-to-person through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes.
However, during early stages of the infection, it is not possible to ascertain whether steps taken to contain the virus were adequate to prevent its spread among wider population, by just looking at number of infected people. Here, a simple method is provided for the first time to detect early the plausible signal from the available data which could predict the nature of spread vis a vis progression in Indian population. It is shown that by ascertaining the rate of increase in percent on regular intervals, could throw light on whether there is slow down (flattening of the curve) or exponential progression of the rate of infection & further fine tune future course of action.

METHODS AND RESULTS:
The study was carried out on the data collected from the entire Indian population who were diagnosed as Coronavirus positive (nCOVD + ve) starting from March 03, 2020. There is a wrong perception among general population that younger population is less effected by the infection with novel COVID-19 as their immune response is better than 'older' individuals. Studies in South Korea 7 and now in Iceland and Netherlands has destroyed the myth and has shown that younger people are equally vulnerable to nCOVID-19 infection (Figure: 3). The same trend was also maintained in the Indian population where there is maximum percentage of coronavirus effected persons were in the age group of 21-40 (42%) as of 5 th April 2020 (Figure-4).