1st June 2020: The government of India is coming up with a model that expects to use the best brains from all over the world, that not only guide India, but the rest of the world.
The Department of Science and Technology has come up with a plan of collaboration inspired by India’s history of using mathematical models for disaster management planning of metrological events. The aim is to create one model for the entire country that will be subjected to rigorous tests required for evidence-based forecasting.
In a statement released on Saturday, it said that it has initiated the exercise to pool in expertise in the field and create a robust supermodel for the prediction of COVID-19. The government’s supermodel shall use knowledge from various global, national and local models. The prediction model is expected to be useful at all stages of the spread of the virus.
The model will bring together the analytics harvested by the numerous mathematical models being developed for Covid-19 forecasting and surveillance with funding by DST-SERB (Science and Engineering Research Board) and other agencies. It will also be provided help from various government advisors and related agencies involved in the same. Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) and IISc, Bangalore have been tasked to co-ordinate and work with all Covid-19 modeling projects and programs in the country.
Government Advisory firm Sapio Analytics is also engaged with the same. “We are in touch with DST and JNCASR, and will provide to them all insights that some of our existing models provide, especially with respect to hyperlocal modelling. We will bring in our best of brains including Nobel Laureates and leading epidemiologists, to ensure this supermodel is aided by our collaboration”, says Ashwin Srivastava, CEO of Sapio Analytics, that has recently been in news for appointing Nobel Laureate and other global brains as advisors to its data driven models.
The use of data in the fight against COVID-19 has been supported and promoted by the Department of Science of Technology, and this announcement comes at a crucial time when India has started opening up.
