Statistical methods for estimating cure fraction of COVID-19 patients in India

Abstract

Human race is under the COVID-19 pandemic menace since beginning of the year 2020. Even though the disease is easily transmissible, a massive fraction of the affected people is recovering. Most of the recovered patients will not experience death due to COVID-19, even if they observed for a long period. They can be treated as long term survivors in the context of lifetime data analysis. In this article, we present statistical methods to estimate the proportion of long term survivors (cure fraction) of the COVID-19 patient population in India. The proportional hazards mixture cure model is used to estimate the cure fraction and the effect of the covariates gender and age, on lifetime. We can see that the cure fraction of the COVID-19 patients in India is more than 90%, which is indeed an optimistic information.