ABSTRACT
The intersectoral impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on humanity raises concerns about its implications for sustainable development. Here, we examine a global quantitative impact of COVID-19 pandemic on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) across all 17 goals using 65 proxy indicators across 72 countries collected from April 2020 to February 2021. Our data-driven analysis indicated that adverse impacts of the pandemic have been particularly concerned on gender equality (Goal 5), affordable and clean energy (Goal 7), decent work and economic growth (Goal 8), sustainable cities and communities (Goal 11), and responsible consumption and production (Goal 12) with global scores estimated to be -0.38, -0.21, -0.28, -0.22 and -0.16, respectively. Country income level was a variable that strongly differentiates the responses to the pandemic (e.g., lower incomes had 14 negative goals compared to 11 and 4 negative goals assigned to middle- and high-income countries, respectively). However, Goals 5 and 8 were highly impacted worldwide regardless of income status. Furthermore, countries that had already higher performance in SDGs were less impacted by the pandemic, highlighting the importance of progress on the SDGs in increasing societal resilience to pandemics. The findings provide insights into the reinforcement of recovery policies (e.g., protecting vulnerable groups and transitioning to a green economy) and a basis for a quantitative discussion on the sectors to be prioritized.
ABSTRACT
Humanity has experienced outbreaks by viruses such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 1 (SARS-CoV-1) in 2003, Eastern respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2012, Ebola virus in 2014 and nowadays SARS-CoV-2. While clinicians seek for a vaccine to reduce the epidemic outbreak, environmental engineers need to understand consequence of virus entity in sewage given the reported persistency of viruses in human feces and sewage environments for more than days. Herein, we discuss about concerns associated with virus occurrence in human feces and sewage, with attention to the possible SARS-CoV-2 transmission routes, based on the review of recent studies on SARS-CoV-2 as well as the previous pandemic events. Given the reported environmental stability of coronavirus, the feces- and sewage-derived transmission routes may be of importance to prevent unprecedented spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) particularly in developing countries. However, so far, limited number of studies detected infectious SARS-CoV-2 even in human feces, whereas a number of virus RNA copies were identified in both feces and sewage specimens. Therefore, uncertainty remains in the possibility of this transmission pathway, and further investigation is warranted in future studies, for example, by increasing the number of specimens, examining the effectiveness of methods for viral viability test, considering the patient medical history, and so forth.