The COVID-19 pandemic's footprint in India: An assessment on the district-level susceptibility and vulnerability
Kashif Imdad,
Mehebub Sahana,
Md Juel Rana,
Ismail Haque,
Priyank Pravin Patel and
Malay Pramanik
MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany
Abstract:
In this nationwide study, we trace the COVID-19 global pandemic's footprint across India's districts. We identify its primary epicentres, which are the major international airports of Mumbai and Delhi. We then track the outbreak into India's hinterlands in four separate time-steps that encapsulate the different lockdown stages implemented. Using a detailed district-level database that encompasses climatic, demographic and socioeconomic parameters, we identify hotspots and significant clusters of COVID-19 cases, which are examined to discern temporal changes and predict areas where the pandemic can next spread into. Of prime concern are the significant clusters in the country's western and northern parts and the threat of rising numbers in the east. Encouraging insights emerge from Kerala in South India, where virus hotspots have been eradicated through effective contact-tracing, mass testing and accessible treatment. Allied with this, we perform epidemiological and socioeconomic susceptibility and vulnerability analyses. The former elicits areas whose resident populations are likely to be physiologically weaker in combating the virus and therein we expect a high incidence of cases. The latter shows regions that can report high fatalities due to ambient poor demographic and health-related factors. Correlations derived from the generalised additive model show that a high share of urban population and high population density (1500-2500 people/km2), particularly in slum areas, elevate the COVID-19 risk. Aspirational districts have a higher magnitude of transmission (susceptibility) as well as fatality (vulnerability). Discerning such locations can allow targeted resource allocation by governments to combat the next phase of this pandemic in India.
Keywords: epidemic outbreak; contagion spread; socioeconomic analysis; epidemiological attributes; novel coronavirus; lockdown measures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I1 I10 I12 I14 I18 R58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-04-31
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/100727/1/MPRA_paper_100727.pdf original version (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:100727
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).