Control Strategies for the Third wave of COVID-19 infection in India: A
Mathematical Model Incorporating Vaccine Effectiveness
Abstract
The waning effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines and the emergence of a
new variant Omicron has given rise to the possibility of another
outbreak of the infection in India. COVID-19 has caused more than 34
million reported cases and 475 thousand deaths in India so far, and it
has affected the country at the root level, socially as well as
economically. After going through different control measures, mass
vaccination has been achieved to a large extent for the highly populous
country, and currently under progress. India has already been hit by a
massive second wave of infection in April-June, 2021 mainly due to the
delta variant, and might see a third wave in the near future that needs
to be controlled with effective control strategies. In this paper, we
present a compartmental epidemiological model with vaccinations
incorporating the dose-dependent effectiveness. We study a possible
sudden outbreak of SARS-CoV2 variants in the future, and bring out the
associated predictions for various vaccination rates and point out
optimum control measures. Our results show that for transmission rate
30% higher than the current rate due to emergence of new variant or
relaxation of social distancing conditions, daily new cases can peak to
250k in March 2022, taking the second dose effectiveness dropping to
50% in the future. A combination of vaccination and controlled lockdown
or social distancing is the key to tackling the current situation and
for the coming few months. Our simulation results show that social
distancing measures show better control over the disease spread than the
higher vaccination rates.