Effect of 2021 assembly election in India on COVID-19 transmission.

Abstract

India is one of the countries in the world which is badly affected by the COVID-19 second wave. Assembly election in four states and a union territory of India was taken place during March–May 2021 when the COVID-19 second wave was close to its peak and affected a huge number of people. We studied the impact of assembly election on the effective contact rate and the effective reproduction number of COVID-19 using different epidemiological models like SIR, SIRD, and SEIR. We also modeled the effective reproduction number for all election-bound states using different mathematical functions. We separately studied the case of all election-bound states and found all the states showed a distinct increase in the effective contact rate and the effective reproduction number during the election-bound time and just after that compared to pre-election time. States, where elections were conducted in single-phase, showed less increase in the effective contact rate and the reproduction number. The election commission imposed extra measures from the first week of April 2021 to restrict big campaign rallies, meetings, and different political activities. The effective contact rate and the reproduction number showed a trend to decrease for few states due to the imposition of the restrictions. We also compared the effective contact rate, and the effective reproduction number of all election-bound states and the rest of India and found all the parameters related to the spread of virus for election-bound states are distinctly high compared to the rest of India.