Impact Assessment of COVID-19 Severity on Environment, Economy and Society towards Affecting Sustainable Development Goals

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every sector in the world, ranging from the education sector to the health sector, administration sector, economic sector and others in different ways. Multiple kinds of research have been performed by research centres, education institutions and research groups to determine the extent of how huge of a threat the COVID-19 pandemic poses to each sector. However, detailed analysis and assessment of its impact on every single target within the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have not been discussed so far. We report an assessment of the impact of COVID-19 effect towards achieving the United Nations SDGs. In assessing the pandemic effects, an expert elicitation model is used to show how the COVID-19 severity affects the positive and negative impact on the 169 targets of 17 SDGs under environment, society and economy groups. We found that the COVID-19 pandemic has a low positive impact in achieving only 34 (20.12%) targets across the available SDGs and a high negative impact of 54 targets (31.95%) in which the most affected group is the economy and society. The environmental group is affected less;rather it helps to achieve a few targets within this group. Our elicitation model indicates that the assessment process effectively measures the mapping of the COVID-19 pandemic impact on achieving the SDGs. This assessment identifies that the COVID-19 pandemic acts mostly as a threat in enabling the targets of the SDGs.

Prerequisite for COVID-19 Prediction: A Review on Factors Affecting the Infection Rate.

Since the year 2020, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has emerged as the dominant topic of discussion in the public and research domains. Intensive research has been carried out on several aspects of COVID-19, including vaccines, its transmission mechanism, detection of COVID-19 infection, and its infection rate and factors. The awareness of the public related to the COVID-19 infection factors enables the public to adhere to the standard operating procedures, while a full elucidation on the correlation of different factors to the infection rate facilitates effective measures to minimize the risk of COVID-19 infection by policy makers and enforcers. Hence, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive and analytical review of different factors affecting the COVID-19 infection rate. Furthermore, this review analyses factors which directly and indirectly affect the COVID-19 infection risk, such as physical distance, ventilation, face masks, meteorological factor, socioeconomic factor, vaccination, host factor, SARS-CoV-2 variants, and the availability of COVID-19 testing. Critical analysis was performed for the different factors by providing quantitative and qualitative studies. Lastly, the challenges of correlating each infection risk factor to the predicted risk of COVID-19 infection are discussed, and recommendations for further research works and interventions are outlined.