Opening Pandora's box: Climate change, COVID-19 and the rise of a new pandemic

Abstract

Abstract Climate change presents an evolving global healthcare crisis having both direct and indirect impacts on communicable and non-communicable diseases. Rapidly changing climatic conditions and extreme weather events promote the transmission of airborne, waterborne, foodborne, and vector-borne pathogens. Emergence of novel pathogens pose a greater threat to humanity. Several individual pathogens have been documented to cause infectious disease in humans are directly exacerbated by environmental hazards. There is a close interplay between climate change, pathogen virulence, spread and host related factors including susceptibility to more severe disease. The direct link between COVID-19 and climate change is unclear. Due to the recent onset and progression of the pandemic, much is still to be learnt on long-term effects of climate change on COVID-19. The central theme from the COVID-19 crisis was the similarity shared by COVID-19 and climate change on the effect on global microeconomic fundamentals. This should serve as a reality check for the revision of our global climate policy, with its neglect coming at an extremely high cost. COVID-19 allows us a glimpse of what we as society may be faced with in the future if we neglect the adverse effects of climate change.