A TRANSPARENT, OPEN-SOURCE SIRD MODEL FOR COVID19 DEATH PROJECTIONS IN INDIA

As India emerges from the lockdown with ever higher COVID19 case counts and a mounting death toll, reliable projections of case numbers and deaths counts are critical in informing policy decisions. We examine various existing models and their shortcomings. Given the amount of uncertainty surrounding the disease we choose a simple SIRD model with minimal assumptions enabling us to make robust predictions. We employ publicly available mobility data from Google to estimate social distancing covariates which influence how fast the disease spreads. We further present a novel method for estimating the uncertainty in our predictions based on first principles. To demonstrate, we fit our model to three regions (Spain, Italy, NYC) where the peak has passed and obtain predictions for the Indian states of Delhi and Maharashtra where the peak is desperately awaited.