Abstract:
India is one of the countries in the world which is badly affected by theCOVID-19 secondwave. Assembly election in four states and a union territory
of India was taken place duringMarch–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 preelection
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.
