Objectives
COVID-19 Pandemic has brought a threatening challenge to the world and as well as for Indian society and economy. In India, it has become a public health disaster and its' intensity increasing continuously. For the disaster risk reduction, and capacity building against the COVID-19 pandemic understanding of the relationship between socio-environmental conditions with the pandemic is very necessary. The objective of the present work is to construct a socio-environmental vulnerability index of the potential risk of community spread of COVID-19 using socio-economic and environmental variables.
Methodology
In this, cross-sectional study principal component analyses have been used to drive SoEVI. 4 uncorrelated sub-index has been extracted from 16 sub-indicators which reflects 59% of the variance. Aggregation of 4 Sub-Index has been done to obtain the final vulnerability Index.
Results
Results show that there is spatial variability in vulnerability based on environmental and socio-economic conditions. Districts of north and central India found more vulnerable then south India. Statistical significance has been tested using regression analysis, positive relation has been found between vulnerability index and confirmed and active cases.
Conclusion
The vulnerability index has highlighted environmentaly and socioeconomicallybackward districts. These areas will suffer more critical problems against COVID-19 pandemic for their socio-environmental problem.
The paper aims to reveal the spatial pattern of the concentration of COVID-19 confirmed cases and the spread of the pandemic from the Case Fatality Ratio. The study has been accomplished with district-level data. The analysis of the spatial pattern decoding has been done considering the Global and Local Moran's I statistics comprising the linear trend of spatial autocorrelation for the whole India. The timeframe has been divided considering the surge of the second wave in March, 2021 and the peak of the wave in May 2021. The spatial clustering technique presents both the concentration of confirmeded cases using Location Quotient analysis and the pattern of spread of the infection-related fatality throughout the country. The high Location Quotient of the confirmeded cases strongly clustered around the Mumbai-Puna region, Kerala-Karnataka region, Garhwal Himachal, NCT of Delhi and Ladakh-Kashmir-Himachal Pradesh region during the period of the study. In May, the concentration has randomly clustered around the middle part of India. The Case Fatality Ratio was high in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana at the surge of the second wave. In peak (May), the two significant clusters of high case fatality ratio is pivoted around in Mumbai urban (Maharashtra) and NCT of Delhi (including Punjab-Haryana).
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