key: cord-1039471-rs0unxoq
authors: Gautam, Sneha; Hens, Luc
title: SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in India: what might we expect?
date: 2020-04-18
journal: Environ Dev Sustain
DOI: 10.1007/s10668-020-00739-5
sha: 00eee133e82efe1b256b17c4d8440928ef5ac224
doc_id: 1039471
cord_uid: rs0unxoq

nan

proportion of elderly people (≥ 65 years) and might be the most vulnerable to this pandemic disease.

On March 22, 2020, The Lt. Governor of Delhi has notified the "Delhi Epidemic Diseases, Covid-19, Regulations, 2020" in New Delhi, where all hospitals to have flu corners to test for suspect cases, history of travelling to be recorded, and right to impose home or institution are the important silent features. On the other hand, all the states of India, applied the notification in which academic institutes will be closed until the next notification. Similarly, the government and private companies have asked their employees to work from home due to novel pandemic issue. The Prime Minister of India "Narendra Modi" announced a 21-day nationwide "Curfew/Lockdown", to minimize the impact of novel coronavirus, as he requested to Indian citizens with folded hands to practise strict social distancing.

To reduce the impact of novel coronavirus and its transmission, lockdown activities launched in whole country with restriction of human mobility and economic activities. However, to observe comprehensive air quality data in different places of India, it can be seen that these novel coronavirus disease countermeasures led to remarkable improvement in the concentration of air pollutants (https ://aqicn .org/map/india /). According to WHO (2018), 4.2 million premature deaths were reported in the year of 2016 due to ambient air pollution. So, as per the air quality index is concerned, the enhancement in air quality of India now would significantly avert premature deaths due to air pollution on monthly/annually basis.

In India, many studies indicated that the transportation and movement of respiratory diseases depend on seasonal variation (Humbal et al. 2018 (Humbal et al. , 2019 (Humbal et al. , 2020 . In this regard, we might expect that the effects of novel coronavirus will be decreased with higher temperature in summer, due to reduction in intrinsic transmissibility of the novel virus (Gautam and Trivedi 2020; Jung et al. 2009 ). Moreover, Ma et al. (2020) conducted the first study to identify the significant effects of meteorological parameters (i.e., temperature and relative humidity) on daily mortality due to Covid-19 in China. This study clearly mentioned that the daily mortality of Covid-19 is positively and negatively associated with temperature and relative humidity, respectively. It can be concluded that the warmer season (higher temperature during next few months) and lockdown activities will be key to reduce the exposure to novel coronavirus on humans. Close monitoring and real time data will be benefitted to predict and make sound public health decisions. The world must prepare for the possibility that mitigation measures might fail because most of the countries are taking too much time to prevent or delay the spread of Covid-19. For example, SARS infects very small proportion of people around the world; however, many people will still become critically ill and need a better treatment or ICU care. The ICU departments should be developed in advance with rapid diagnosis and isolation, clinical management and infection prevention to control the incremental patients and optimize workflows. To prepare for a substantial increase in critical care bed capacity, three working bodies (i.e., state-national governments, hospital authorities and decision/policy makers) must come together and work with ICU practitioners. Scientists/professor/researchers have to address the important questions-"What remains a poorly understood disease". The focus on high-quality research work, real time data, practices based on real evidences, data availability based on open access, ethical integration in the point of extraordinary challenges and collaboration with chain like local to national and national to international will be important key factors to the success of this hard work.

These major viral pandemics all entail environmental, economic and social aspects which have only partially been described. This journal is open to research contributions on the sustainability aspects of Covid-19, SARS and related pandemics.

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