Corona Outbreak: Is it Nature’s wake-up Call?

Abstract

Abstract Corona pandemic triggered by SARS-CoV-2, the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus-2 has swept the world and created unique health-emergencies. Highly unrelated issues may have cumulated for a crisis of this magnitude to have occurred and can be aptly correlated to climatic and biodiversity changes that are deeply interlinked. It has emerged due to failing human health caused by climatic changes, over urbanization, and civilisations endangering the natural habitats on which they depend. As the pandemic progresses, a plethora of scientific and technical news keeps getting updated, causing a lot of anxieties on the therapeutics of corona virus and prior knowledge makes correlations among demography, climate and regional availabilities to manage the spread of the infection. This epidemic further altered the life style; causing huge losses and endangered the sustenance and livelihood of people. The review brings forth a consolidated story of the zoonotic origin of SARS-COV-2, its molecular structure, and discusses the ecological factors responsible for pandemic outbreak of Covid-19 and the strategies applied for the treatment. The list of “zoonotic diseases” includes bird flu, Ebola, HIV, Hendra, Zika, Hendra, SARS, and MERS. Having bats as its initial host, Corona then got communicated to humans directly or via a intermediate biological host. For any disease to become pandemic, ecological factors such as high population growth rate, malnutrition and unhygienic conditions, poor health sectors, environmental changes are responsible. Several environmental factors such as decrease in air-particulate matter, lowered emissions of CO2 and NO2 primarily because of lockdown leading to negligible human activities have caused reduction in air and water pollution in various countries. Undeniably, the worldwide air pollution is linked to industrialization, urbanization, consumption of excess fossil fuels etc. The unprecedented lockdown due to Covid-19 created a situation where the natural evolutionary processes protected and maintained the environmental concerns. This review deals with the necessity of controlling spread of disease in a sustainable way by nurturing nature and reminding the humans that this after all maybe the nature’s wake-up call?.