Projections for COVID-19 spread in India and its worst affected five states using the Modified SEIRD and LSTM models

The last leg of the year 2019 gave rise to a virus named COVID-19 (Corona Virus Disease 2019). Since the beginning of this infection in India, the government implemented several policies and restrictions to curtail its spread among the population. As the time passed, these restrictions were relaxed and people were advised to follow precautionary measures by themselves. These timely decisions taken by the Indian government helped in decelerating the spread of COVID-19 to a large extent. Despite these decisions, the pandemic continues to spread and hence, there is an urgent need to plan and control the spread of this disease. This is possible by finding the future predictions about the spread. Scientists across the globe are working towards estimating the future growth of COVID-19. This paper proposes a Modified SEIRD (Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered-Deceased) model for projecting COVID-19 infections in India and its five states having the highest number of total cases. In this model, exposed compartment contains individuals which may be asymptomatic but infectious. Deep Learning based Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model has also been used in this paper to perform short-term projections. The projections obtained from the proposed Modified SEIRD model have also been compared with the projections made by LSTM for next 30 days. The epidemiological data up to 15th August 2020 has been used for carrying out predictions in this paper. These predictions will help in arranging adequate medical infrastructure and providing proper preventive measures to handle the current pandemic. The effect of different lockdowns imposed by the Indian government has also been used in modelling and analysis in the proposed Modified SEIRD model. The results presented in this paper will act as a beacon for future policy-making to control the COVID-19 spread in India.