Before revision:  Weak intervention strategies (that reduce R_0 but not to a value less than 1) can reduce the peak values of infections and the asymptotic affected population. We provide simple analytic expressions for these in terms of the disease parameters and apply them in the Indian context to obtain heuristic projections for the course of the pandemic .
After revision:  We apply our results to the COVID data for India to obtain heuristic projections for the course of the pandemic .