Covid-19 Second Wave And India´s Rivers Health

We have learnt a lot about how to break the transmission chain of SARS-CoV-2 by rapid testing, vaccination, sanitization, social distancing, social networking, etc. However, the conversation over SARS-CoV-2 transmission is still remnants.

- Dr. Vinod Kumar

The two primary transmission routes of SARS-CoV-2 have been reported. The first route is respiratory droplets in the form of aerosols produced during sneezing or coughing by covid patients. The second route is the direct contact transmission via droplets that might settle on the surface. In India, discharge of untreated sewage into rivers is a common practice, which may lead to contamination of river water by sewage tainted by coronavirus (COVID) infected patients' dead bodies, faeces and urines.

The outbreak of a novel COVID19 began at the end of December 2019 and the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 quickly expanded worldwide. In the second week of May 2021, India was broken by a record of 380,000 new infections and over 4100 fatalities per day. Since March 14, 2020, India has reported 20.3 million cases with 20 million recoveries and over 0.25 million fatalities (Dong et al., 2020). The government promptly responded to the Covid-19 threat last year (i.e., 2020) and its preventing measure was ranked the most stringent in the world, exceeding countries like the USA, UK, and Germany, etc. (Yadav et al., 2020). In this year, however, the hospitals are overburdened, and health care staffs are exhausted and becoming infected. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimates around 1 million mortality from COVID-19 in India by Aug 1, 2021 (Editor 2021).