Measuring the Environmental and Social Risk of Exposure to Future Epidemics

Abstract

One of the problems in a not-too-distance future is the possibility of preventing and/or containing new infectious disease outbreaks that generate negatively impact on public health and economy of countries. The current monitoring of transmission dynamics is mainly based on reproduction number and fatality rates. However, this approach is a real-time monitoring of transmission dynamics for containing the spread of pandemic and, as a consequence, numbers of COVID-19 related infected individuals and deaths. Reproduction number does not provide, ex-ante, information to cope with future epidemics. The main goal of this study is to propose the index c (as contagions) that measures, ex-ante, the environmental risk of exposure of cities and/or regions to future epidemics of COVID-19 and similar vital agents. In particular, this index c synthetizes environmental, socioeconomic and health risk factors of cities/regions of exposure to infectious diseases and has a range from 1 (environmental and social weakness leading to high levels of infected individuals and deaths) to 0 (environment that reduces the risk of infectious diseases in society). The statistical evidence here seems in general to support the predictive results of the index c as particularly simple but superior indicator in detecting the global correlation between potential risk of high exposure of cities/regions to infectious diseases and actual high numbers of COVID-19 related infected individuals and deaths of cities/regions. The index c can support a proactive strategy to help policymakers firstly to prevent infectious diseases and, in case of diffusion of epidemics, to constrain new infectious diseases similar to COVID-19 with appropriate measures and technologies on environment and society.