Covid19tracker.in, a one-stop website providing all the information related to the pandemic in India like daily updates on case numbers, vaccinations, and tests for each state of India was launched on Friday.
The initiative of the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, comes as a replacement for covid19india.org which had stopped operating on November 1.
“As Covid-19 information is crucial to Indians of all hues (researchers, students, and the public), a team of developers were authorised by IITH to carry on the work. covid19tracker.in is built using the public code base of covid19india.org website,” officials said.
The developers said their website has improved features like critical updates availability in 10 Indian languages. The website also offers predictions (including the post-Omicron scenario) using the Sutra model.
“In future, we plan to enhance the website by including a search feature to highlight trends and raise alerts as and when required. If resources permit, we will monitor not just India but other countries as well. The emergence of the Omicron variant of concern shows that India cannot collect and monitor its data in isolation,” said Mathukumalli Vidyasagar, a distinguished professor at IITH.
Mathukumalli headed the national Covid-19 supermodel committee that predicted the onset of the second wave earlier this year.
Omicron: Third wave
Sutra, a consortium of academics from various IITs and other institutions, is predicting a worst-case scenario of up to 1.5 lakh new Covid-19 cases per day by January end-February beginning because of the Omicron variant spread in the country.
Even in an optimistic scenario, the estimation is that there could be about one lakh cases per day.
“We have not made any projections on hospitalisations, which anyway were reported to be low in South Africa,” said Prof Mathukumalli, a senior member of Sutra. “But since we had witnessed a situation of around four lakh cases per day during the second wave in the country, I think there would not be any excess pressure on our health facilities.”
covid19tracker.in, funded, developed and maintained by IIT Hyderabad, provides external links to the CoWIN dashboard for vaccination data and INSACOG database of coronavirus variants.
“We run the predictions every day, but the updates would be on display when there are substantial variations,” Mathukumalli,
The website served over 18 million requests from a quarter-million visitors over the past 30 days.
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