COVID-19 Outbreak In India Research Articles

Negative impact of social media panic during the COVID-19 outbreak in India.

Social media has played a crucial role in spreading awareness and knowledge about public health; however, it has also been misused for spreading fake news, hatred and creating racism during epidemics and civil unrest. We discuss how social media and societal response to COVID-19 negatively affected its control measures in India and what should be possible corrective measures.

Investigation on the COVID-19 Outbreak in India: Lockdown Impact and Vulnerability Analysis

Coronavirus (COVID-19) disease is a major pandemic which has taken the world by storm. More than 524,000 citizens of the globe have succumbed to the disease as on 3rd July, 2020. Accurate modeling of the dynamics of the disease spread is required to curb the virus. With the availability of large amount of data made available publicly by the Government agency as well as the other live crowdsourcing media, it is possible to develop an accurate local prediction tool. In this study, we analyze the dynamics of local outbreaks of COVID-19 for few states of India with major outbreaks and for India as a whole. The large amount of data available from the COVID-19 Tracker India platform was utilized to estimate the impact of lockdown in the country and the states with major outbreaks. The effectiveness of the lockdown implementation by the respective states is studied for the analysis. The lockdown was categorized into strict, moderate, and lenient. The model is deployed on a web based platform to disseminate the alert to the public. We further extend the ordinary differential Equation (ODE) based model to generate district level vulnerability index for the whole country based on the rate of change of infected people, breach in social distancing, and population. Around 47% of districts of the country were not found vulnerable; however, 13% of the districts were identified as high risk for the disease outbreak.

Use of Hypochlorite Solution as Disinfectant during COVID-19 Outbreak in India: From the Perspective of Human Health and Atmospheric Chemistry

The current situation in India regarding the COVID-19 pandemic is the worst since its first detection, in terms of the number of new cases per day, and it is now more than 10000 (as of June 7, 2020). In addition to several precautionary steps being taken (social distancing, use of masks, sanitizing hands etc.), spraying disinfectants (NaOCl solution) over several residential, official and commercial buildings, open areas, markets, public road transports, railways etchas been occurring on a regular basis. It has also cometo the world’s attention that spraying of disinfectants has been especially used on people who are migrating from one part of the country to another. In this letter, I have made an attempt to discuss some major impacts of NaOCl on human health as well as atmospheric chemistry. NaOCl once emitted into the air reacts easily with the water vapor to form HOCl that further gets photo-dissociated into various reactive species. These reactive species have significant potentials to participate in various tropospheric chemistry of chlorine radical, ozone, S (IV) oxidation, hydrocarbon oxidation, modification of chloride salts etc. I have also recommended some important steps to be taken if spraying of NaOClis deemed essential.

Structured action plan for mental and behavioral preparedness against virus COVID19 outbreak in India (SAMBAV Bharath): Proposal for augmenting mental health services

The world Health Organization (WHO) has designated the novel coronavirus outbreak (COVID19) as a pandemic. It is estimated that 125 million to 250 million people in India will be affected and 70% of humanity is likely to be infected within 1 year. The psychological impact can be from stress or economic-socio-occupational disruption, and people may suffer from fear of infection, anger, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, increased substance use, or relapse of psychiatric disorders. This can be of great concern for India, which already has high mental health morbidity but the lowest number of mental health experts, according to the WHO. Hence, it is imperative to consider the empowerment of available human resources. Here, we propose a structured action plan for mental and behavioral preparedness against virus COVID 19 disaster currently but virtually for any disaster in the country (SAMBAV Bharath). It designed to enable people by providing online training for individuals as mental health facilitators, who can assist the needy during and aftermath of the disaster.