Analyzing the Risk to COVID-19 Infection using Remote Sensing and GIS.

Abstract

Globally, the COVID‐19 pandemic has become a threat to humans and to the socioeconomic systems they have developed since the industrial revolution. Hence, governments and stakeholders call for strategies to help restore normalcy while dealing with this pandemic effectively. Since till now, the disease is yet to have a cure; therefore, only risk‐based decision making can help governments achieve a sustainable solution in the long term. To help the decisionmakers explore viable actions, we propose a risk‐based assessment framework for analyzing COVID‐19 risk to areas, using integrated hazard and vulnerability components associated with this pandemic for effective risk mitigation. The study is carried on a region administrated by Jaipur municipal corporation (JMC), India. Based on the current understanding of this disease, we hypothesized different COVID‐19 risk indices (C19Ri) of the wards of JMC such as proximity to hotspots, total population, population density, availability of clean water, and associated land use/land cover, are related with COVID‐19 contagion and calculated them in a GIS‐based multicriteria risk reduction method. The results showed disparateness in COVID‐19 risk areas with a higher risk in north‐eastern and south‐eastern zone wards within the boundary of JMC. We proposed prioritizing wards under higher risk zones for intelligent decision making regarding COVID‐19 risk reduction through appropriate management of resources‐related policy consequences. This study aims to serve as a baseline study to be replicated in other parts of the country or world to eradicate the threat of COVID‐19 effectively.