A study of the impact of policy interventions on daily COVID scenario in India using interrupted time series analysis

Article Type

Research Article

Publication Title

Epidemiologic Methods

Abstract

Objectives: The rapid increase both in daily cases and daily deaths made the second wave of COVID-19 pandemic in India more lethal than the first wave. Record number of infections and casualties were reported all over India during this period. Delhi and Maharashtra are the two most affected places in India during the second wave. So in response to this, the Indian government implemented strict intervention policies ("lockdowns", "social distancing"and "vaccination drive") in every state during this period to prohibit the spread of this virus. The objective of this article is to conduct an interrupted time series (ITS) analysis to study the impact of the interventions on the daily cases and deaths. Methods: We collect daily data for Delhi and Maharashtra before and after the intervention points with a 14-day (incubation period of COVID-19) observation window. A segmented linear regression analysis is done to study the post-intervention slopes as well as whether there were any immediate changes after the interventions or not. We also add the counterfactuals and delayed time effects in the analysis to investigate the significance of our ITS design. Results: Here, we observe the post-intervention trends to be statistically significant and negative for both the daily cases and the daily deaths. We also find that there is no immediate change in trend after the start of intervention, and hence we study some delayed time effects which display how changes in the trends happened over time. And from the Counterfactuals in our study, we can have an idea what would have happened to the COVID scenario had the interventions not been implemented. Conclusions: We statistically try to figure out different circumstances of COVID scenario for both Delhi and Maharashtra by exploring all possible ingredients of ITS design in our analysis in order to present a feasible design to show the importance of implementation of proper intervention policies for tackling this type of pandemic which can have various highly contagious variants.

DOI

https://10.1515/em-2022-0113

Publication Date

1-1-2023

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS