“…Numerous scholars have attempted to understand the COVID-19 infectious disease from various perspectives such as the socio-demography ( Sannigrahi et al, 2020 ), changes in air quality after lockdown ( Park et al, 2020 ; Shen et al, 2021 ; Xu et al, 2020 ), environmental conditions ( Bashir et al, 2020 ), air pollution ( Wu et al, 2020a ), spatial dependency ( Briz-Redón and Serrano-Aroca, 2020 ), and spatiotemporal correlation ( Elson et al, 2021 ; Sartorius et al, 2021 ), to name a few. In addition, significant effort has been devoted to investigating various facets of transmission dynamics of COVID-19, including human-to-human diffusion mechanism ( Anand, Cabreros, et al, 2021a , 2021b ; Bontempi, 2020a ), environment-to-human transmission ( Bashir et al, 2020 ; Coccia, 2020a ; Rahimi et al, 2021 ; Sarkodie and Owusu, 2020 ), and pollution-to-human transmission ( Domingo et al, 2020 ; Maleki et al, 2021 ). To account for human-to-human diffusion mechanism, some researchers have considered non-pharmaceutical behaviors and policy-based strategy such as restriction measures ( Chen et al, 2021 ; Coccia, 2021c ), while others have examined the role of socio-economic factors including commercial exchange ( Bontempi, 2020a ), GDP ( Coccia, 2021d ; Islam et al, 2021 ), and population density ( Diao et al, 2020 ; Coccia, 2021b ).…”