Lockdown As A Pandemic Mitigating Policy Intervention In India

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWWe use publicly available timeline data on the Covid-19 outbreak for nine indian states to calculate the important quantifier of the outbreak, the sought after Rt or the time varying reproduction number of the outbreak. This quantity can be measured in in several ways, e.g. by application of Stochastic compartmentalised SIR (DCM) model, Poissonian likelihood based (ML) model & the exponential growth rate (EGR) model. The third one is known as the effective reproduction number of an outbreak. Here we use, mostly, the second one. It is known as the instantaneous reproduction number for an outbreak. This number can faithfully tell us the success of lockdown measures inside indian states, as containment policy for the spread of Covid-19 viral disease. This can also, indirectly yield notional value of the generation time inteval in different states. In doing this work we employ, pan India serial interval of the outbreak estimated directly from data from January 30th to April 19th, 2020. Simultaneously, in conjunction with the serial interval data, our result is derived from incidences data between March 14th, 2020 to June 1st, 2020, for the said states. We find the lockdown had marked positive effect on the nature of time dependent reproduction number in most of the Indian states, barring a couple. The possible reason for such failures have been investigated.