Home // International Journal On Advances in Life Sciences, volume 14, numbers 1 and 2, 2022 // View article

Spatio-temporal Analysis of Air Quality Index and Risk Simulator for Health Infrastructure Planning During COVID-19 Pandemic

Authors:
Sanjana Pai Nagarmat
Saiyed Kashif Shaukat

Keywords: COVID-19; air quality index; risk score

Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown light on the need to prioritize and improve the existing health systems globally. Especially in South Asia, the pandemic has left a long-term scar on the economy and people's lives. It has burdened the cities to improve their overall health and medical infrastructure facilities. Though several makeshift solutions developed in due time provided intermediate relief to the cities, a long-term solution to make the city self-sufficient in terms of resources, especially in situations like the pandemic becomes necessary. Thus, a collaborative approach to bring about an overall change in the existing health system is required. In this work, we provide an in-depth Spatio-temporal analysis of the air quality in an Indian smart city - Pune and propose a simulator tool that assists authorities in making informed decisions on adding medical infrastructure facilities. This simulator tool takes in static demographical inputs, user inputs related to the city infrastructure, and forecasted dynamic inputs like critical zones or hotspots along with the overall air quality levels to predict the risk scores of wards. This numerical predicted score is an indicator of the ward level risk. Concerned authorities can use this tool to foresee the ward conditions and understand the impact of the risk score in a ward with incremental variations in the ward facilities during the pandemic. Further, the Spatio-temporal analysis of the Air Quality Index (AQI) shows how certain strategies and guidelines imposed during the pandemic can help bring in significant improvement in the environmental health condition of the city. It provides a detailed summary of the variation in the air quality index and pollutant concentrations in Pune from March 2020 to July 2021. Overall, this work provides a retrospective view on the impact of demographic, medical infrastructure, and environmental parameters on the ward condition and how improvement in these parameters can help cities ameliorate the existing health system in challenging times like the pandemic.

Pages: 1 to 10

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2022. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2022

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2660