A cross-sectional study of COVID-19 outbreak in Indian population

BACKGROUND: Presently India is the second most populous country in the world with an estimated population of 1.4 billion people and has recently been affected by COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent mutant viral outbreak. To date, India has administered its population with over 1.30 billion cumulative doses of COVID-19 vaccine. The consequences of COVID-19 vaccination on the outbreak in India has not been reported until now. Therefore, we probed to assess the impact of COVID-19 outbreak in India from December 2019 to December 2021. METHODS: Indian COVID-19 related data were extracted from “ourworldindata.org” and “cowin.gov.in” databases. The incidence rate of COVID-19 per million people was calculated and other parameters such as new cases, positive rate, reproduction rate, new death and stringency index values were extracted from the database for statistical analysis. RESULTS: Data indicate that the COVID-19 positive rate declined as the number of vaccinations rose over time. The Pearson correlation values between new cases and the cumulative percentage of vaccination or the percentage of fully vaccinated population showed no correlation (P < 0.01). COVID-19 vaccination has significantly decreased the R-value and positive rate of SARS-CoV-2 in India (P < 0.01). Furthermore, containment measures showed no correlation with the incidence rate of SARS-CoV-2 in India which may be in contradictory to the global trends. CONCLUSION: Vaccination against COVID-19 was efficacious in the control of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak and the decrease in the positive rate. Further, the containment measures had no effect on the spread of COVID-19 infection in India, thus far.