Version 1
: Received: 23 May 2020 / Approved: 24 May 2020 / Online: 24 May 2020 (19:34:03 CEST)
How to cite:
Kumar, S.; Bhardwaj, S.; Singh, A.; Singh, H.K.; Singh, P.; Sharma, U.K. Environmental Impact of Corona Virus (COVID-19) and Nationwide Lockdown in India: An Alarm to Future Lockdown Strategies. Preprints2020, 2020050403. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202005.0403.v1.
Kumar, S.; Bhardwaj, S.; Singh, A.; Singh, H.K.; Singh, P.; Sharma, U.K. Environmental Impact of Corona Virus (COVID-19) and Nationwide Lockdown in India: An Alarm to Future Lockdown Strategies. Preprints 2020, 2020050403. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202005.0403.v1.
Cite as:
Kumar, S.; Bhardwaj, S.; Singh, A.; Singh, H.K.; Singh, P.; Sharma, U.K. Environmental Impact of Corona Virus (COVID-19) and Nationwide Lockdown in India: An Alarm to Future Lockdown Strategies. Preprints2020, 2020050403. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202005.0403.v1.
Kumar, S.; Bhardwaj, S.; Singh, A.; Singh, H.K.; Singh, P.; Sharma, U.K. Environmental Impact of Corona Virus (COVID-19) and Nationwide Lockdown in India: An Alarm to Future Lockdown Strategies. Preprints 2020, 2020050403. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202005.0403.v1.
Abstract
Global emerge of zoonotic novel corona virus (COVID-19) became a pandemic and its effect to mankind is talk of the town now a days. This tiny, invisible enemy has affected every country in the world and almost every living directly or indirectly and nationwide complete lockdown has triggered a short-term environmental impact. Since 2003, corona virus came into existence in the form of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and more evolved Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2012. This time, at the end of December 2019, outbreak of novel corona virus COVID-19 (also known as SARS-CoV2, nCoV-2019) draw attention as global health emergency. World Health Organization (WHO) report says that the outbreak of this virus is so immense, it has already affected 35,57,235 people and caused death to 2,45,150 people worldwide and 46,433 Indians got affected with 1568 death as on 5th May 2020 (2:00 am) and these numbers are increasing exponentially day by day. Virologist, micro-biologist and science community are hammering their head very hard to find out cure and vaccine against this powerful virus and to prevent mass demise of mankind. In order to curb the spread of COVID-19, Janta curfew on 22.03.2020 and nationwide complete lockdown was implemented in India for 21 days (phase-I, from 25.03.2020 to 14.04.2020) to stop community transmission of third stage, for 19 days (phase-II, 15.04.2020 to 03.05.2020) and 14 days (phase-III, 04.05.2020 to 17.05.2020) complete lockdown to minimize the community transmission effect. During complete lockdown and quarantine period a drastic change in Earth’s atmosphere, including reduction in emission of greenhouse gases, air pollution (~50% fall in air quality index), noise pollution, water pollution and solid waste pollution, have been recorded by government agencies as well as private agencies. In this paper we considered data of Janta curfew, phase-I and phase-II lockdown to link between geological and environmental aspect related to environmental impact due to emerge of COVID-19 and massive reduction in pollution level during complete lockdown in India. We propose future lockdown strategies to minimize the emission of greenhouse gas by ~100 Mt to ~200Mt (3.33% to 6.66%) of GHGtotal per year by 2-4 days per month nationwide lockdown or ~70 Mt to ~140 Mt (2.33% to 4.66%) of GHGtotal per year by 2-4 days per month complete lockdown of energy sectors only.
Keywords
zoonotic; corona virus; COVID-19; SARS; MERS; global health emergency; India; lockdown strategies
Subject
EARTH SCIENCES, Environmental Sciences
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
