Spatiotemporal patterns of Covid-19 pandemic in India: Inferences of pandemic dynamics from data analysis

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Covid-19 data in India using growth functions and harmonic analysis, revealing insights into disease spread, effects of interventions, and regional wave patterns to inform mitigation strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a combined growth and harmonic analysis approach to understand Covid-19 dynamics in India, highlighting regional variations and the impact of control measures.

Findings

Growth function parameters are sensitive to infection growth and lockdown effects.

Harmonic analysis shows synchronous national incident features due to control strategies.

Regional analysis reveals traveling wave patterns in disease propagation.

Abstract

Modeling and analysis of the large scale Covid-19 pandemic data can yield inferences about it's dynamics and characteristics of disease propagation. These inferences can then be correlated with contextual factors like population density, effects of strategic interventions, heterogeneous disease propagation etc, and such set of validated inferences can serve as precedents for designing of subsequent mitigation strategies. In this work, we present the analysis of Covid-19 pandemic data in Indian context using growth functions fitting procedure and harmonic analysis method. Our results of growth function fitting to the data indicate that the growth function parameters are quite sensitive to the growth of the infected population indicating positive impact of lockdown strategy, identification of inflection point and nearly synchronous statistical features of disease spreading. The harmonic analysis of the data shows the countrywide synchronous incident features due to simultaneous implementation of control strategies. However, if one analyzes the data from each state of the India, one can see various forms of travelling waves in the countrywide wave pattern. Hence, one needs to do these analysis from time to time to understand the effectiveness of any control strategy and to closely look at the disease propagation to devise the required type of mitigation strategies.