Novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic: From transmission to control with an interdisciplinary vision

Abstract

There a lot of review papers addressing specific COVID-19 research sectors, then devoted to specialists. This review provides an in-depth summary of the available information about SARS-CoV-2 and the corresponding disease (also known as COVID-19), with a multi-disciplinary approach. After the paper introduction, the first section treats the virological characteristics of SARS-CoV-2, the medical implications of the infection, and the human susceptivity. Great attention is devoted to the factor affecting the infection routes, distinguishing among the possible human-to-human, environmental-to-human, and pollution-to-human transmission mechanisms. The second section is devoted to reporting the impact of SARS-CoV-2 not only on the healthcare systems but also on the economy and society. The third section is devoted to non-pharmaceutical behaviours against COVID-19. In this context, this review section presents an analysis of the European second wave allowing not only to focalize the importance of some restrictions, but also the relevance of social acceptance of some measures. The data reassumed in this work are very useful for interdisciplinary researchers that work in a team to find the basic available information about all the aspects connected with this pandemic (from virus diffusion mechanism to health information, from economic and social impacts to measures to reduce the pandemic spread), with great attention to social acceptance of restriction measures and of vaccines (that currently results to be insufficient to achieve community immunity). Then, this review paper highlights the fundamental role of the trans-multi-disciplinary research that is devoted not only to understand the basics of the pandemic to propose solutions but has also the commitment to find strategies to increase population resilience. For this aim, the authors strongly suggest the establishment of an international health-care trans-multi-disciplinary workforce devoted to investigate, mitigate, and control also future viral events.

Exploring the effects of PM2.5 and temperature on COVID-19 transmission in Seoul, South Korea

“…The estimated relative risks of COVID-19 infections by a unit increase in PM 2.5 concentration (standardized) is 10.85 % = exp (0.103) – exp (0) increase, assuming that other factors are fixed. Similar findings can be found in previous works ( Coccia, 2020c , 2020d , 2021a , 2021b ; Hoang et al, 2021 ; Yao et al, 2020 ; Zhu et al, 2020 ). According to Bontempi (2020b) , the pollution can be a source of the virus spread, so-called pollution-to-human transmission mechanism, so that dust and PM 2.5 can facilitate the transmission of the COVID-19 virus droplets and particles ( Domingo et al, 2020 ; Maleki et al, 2021 ; Srivastava, 2021 ).…”

“…A similar statement can be made for temperature while holding other factors constant; a unit increase in temperature would lead to −45.4 % = exp (−0.605) – exp (0), indicating a reduction in the relative risks. Several studies confirm that under higher temperature, the spread of COVID-19 tends to be slower (i.e., the virus remains active at low temperature), implying the mitigating effect against the survival and transmission of the virus ( Anand, Cabreros, et al, 2020 ; Rahimi et al, 2021 ; Sarkodie and Owusu, 2020 ; Xie and Zhu, 2020 ). In line with them, our study also verifies the negative influence of temperature on COVID-19 transmission.…”

“…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 ).…”

“…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 ). Regarding environment-to-human as well as pollution-to-human transmission mechanisms, several researchers have studied the association between COVID-19 transmission and meteorological factors such as temperature ( Xie and Zhu, 2020 ; Islam et al, 2021 ), humidity ( Haque and Rahman, 2020 ; Diao et al, 2020 ), and wind speed ( Coccia, 2020a , 2020c , 2021b , 2020c ), and pollution factors including air pollutants ( Barakat et al, 2020 ; Copat et al, 2020 ; Hoang et al, 2021 ) and wastewater ( Anand, Cabreros, et al, 2021a , 2021b ; Rahimi et al, 2021 ). It is worth noting that, however, the mechanisms underlying the airborne transport of COVID-19 have not been fully elucidated.…”

International trade as critical parameter of COVID-19 spread that outclasses demographic, economic, environmental, and pollution factors

“…However, data about air pollution can be associated with other determinant factors related to human-to-human transmission mechanism, such as density of population, socioeconomic activity, etc. ( Anand et al, 2021 ; Bontempi, 2020 ). Several studies analyze the diffusion of COVID-19 pandemic at the city (of few cities) or regional scale; few works investigate transmission dynamics at the national level ( Bontempi, 2020a ).…”