Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2020) 135: 526
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-020-00531-4

Letter to the Editor

Can India develop herd immunity against COVID-19?

¹ Department of Mathematics, School of Advanced Sciences, Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India
² Dipartimento di Scienze Matematiche, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129, Turin, Italy
³ INFN, Sezione di Torino, Via P. Giuria 1, 10125, Torino, Italy
⁴ Almunawarrah Dynamic Enterprise, 43000, Kajang, Malaysia

^c santoban@gmail.com

Received: 27 May 2020
Accepted: 11 June 2020
Published online: 26 June 2020

Abstract

World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak to be a public health crisis of international concern. Further, it provided advice to the global community that countries should place strong measures to detect disease early, isolate and treat cases, trace contacts and promote “social distancing” measures commensurate with the risk. This study analyses the COVID-19 infection data from the top 15 affected countries in which we observed heterogeneous growth patterns of the virus. Hence, this paper applies multifractal formalism on COVID-19 data with the notion that country-specific infection rates follow a power law growth behaviour. According to the estimated generalized fractal dimension curves, the effects of drastic containment measures on the pandemic in India indicate that a significant reduction of the infection rate as its population is concern. Also, comparison results with other countries demonstrate that India has less death rate or more immunity against COVID-19.