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Lockdown and Reopening the Economy
This article explores the spatial dynamics of COVID-19—with nationwide and partial lockdowns’ in its two waves, respectively—in India by employing the location quotient and univariate Moran’s I statistics with various variables representing spatial adjacency, proximity, population, population density, urbanisation, migration, and health infrastructure variables. The results suggest that though geographical proximity to the hotspot states played an important role in triggering the outbreak during both the waves, it could not influence the spatial clustering at the sluggish phase of the pandemic.
The authors are grateful to the reviewer and the editorial team for their constructive suggestions and comments.
COVID-19 has emerged as a public health emergency across continents and has a massive impact on the lives of millions. It has become an economic crisis, too, for most of the countries since the governments were forced to impose a complete lockdown stopping all economic activities or with limited essential activities. Zoonotic transmissions like COVID-19, associated with multiple outbreaks (for example, Ebola and H1N1), are a global public health burden (Plowright et al 2017). As of 16 July 2021, there are 18,86,55,968 confirmed cases and 40,67,517 deaths due to COVID-19 reported in the world. India is now one of the worst-hit countries battling the COVID-19 outbreak. As of 16 July 2021, in terms of the newly reported cases in the last 24 hours, India was among the top five countries in the world. However, India is at the second position in the list of countries in terms of the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases after the United States (US).
Identification of the epicentre or core of the disease is one of the major tasks in public health, especially for communicable diseases with the potential to be an epidemic (Meng et al 2005). The understanding of spatial dimension is important to understand the “facets of the realities of processes” of virus transmission (Meng et al 2005). The pathogen pressure or the amount of virus available to the human host at a given space and time is one of the important determinants of virus spillover (Plowright et al 2017). The study intends to use spatial analysis to understand the regional diffusion process of COVID-19 in India and its implications on policy design to fight this unprecedented and highly infectious disease.
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