The dual impact of lockdown on curbing COVID-19 spread and rise of air quality index in India

Abstract

The number of reported cases in India has been scaling up in geometric progression despite the stringent lockdown norms imposed to keep people indoors since late March. Interestingly, on 31st March there were 1117 affected cases, 33,610 on 30th April and 511,478 till June 26-an unprecedented rise in the numbers. In the present research article, we propose a differential equation-based mathematical model for modeling India's COVID-19 that incorporates the lockdown effect while looking at the future predictions in terms of the spread and the extent to which lockdown has been effective in India. We have estimated the growth of COVID-19 across India using modified SIR modeling, which is a Compartmental model in Epidemiology. Further, the use of SIQR model to estimate the growth of this disease across the country. Also, a constant factor has been introduced in the model to measure the number of corona-affected patients count due to any accidental mass crowd gathering. Along with that, we analyse the pollution level of India under three conditional scenarios viz. Pre-Lockdown, During Lockdown and After Lockdown. From the epidemiological evidences, it is evident that several pollutants like pm 2.5, NO2, SO2, O3, CO noxious effects of pollution. Here we will analyse the basic contributing factor of pollution and which majorly impacts AQI. We will also visualise the change of AQI in the context of the season or a particular time, i.e. during the festive season and Diwali pollution highly increases and it continues till April. During COVID-19, to avoid the contamination and spreading of the virus, Govt of India declared Lockdown and due to this all the industrial works gets stopped and the reduction of vehicular waste also reduced and thus the concentration of pollutants () decreases immensely. It can be interpreted that due to closure of industries and decreases in the number of vehicles, the concentration of the pollutants decreases thus it can be said that COVID-19 is a blessing to nature. But after reopening, i.e. unlock 1 the concentration, increases rapidly and immensely and from the reports, it is evident that in only in ecological regions, there is an increase of 400%. Thus after unlock, people are avoiding social gathering maintaining social distance preferring own vehicle rather than the public vehicle. Also, sales of the cycle are increasing promoting greenery and the use of pollution-free vehicles. Is the Nightmare and pandemic situation helps to maintain ecological balance? In this paper we try to analyse these facts keeping different factors into consideration, we will deal with the trend and seasonality of AQI and predict using time series analysis and LSTM. We will build a model which will give a satisfactory output of the quality of air and how the pollutants hamper human health using mathematical models. The novelty in the paper is the comparative study of the models under two scenarios viz., what could have been the figure without lockdown and social distancing and with lockdown and social distancing, along with the AQI Analysis on the same said scenarios. Simultaneously, this is correlated with the predictions for the rise of air quality level.