Environmental impact of coronavirus (COVID-19) from Turkish perceptive
Serdar Aydın, Betina Assumpta Nakiyingi, Cengiz Esmen, Sinan Güneysu, Meena Ejjada
Abstract
In December 2019, a highly infectious and deadly respiratory virus infected humans for the first time; it was named coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). COVID-19 proliferated faster than public health measures could contain it. Scientists have chased the origin of coronaviruses for more than a decade, and found them to be from bats residing in China’s Yanzi and Shitou caves (Wang et al. 2018 ). Coronaviruses are viruses that are covered in small spikes of protein, which look like a crown (Sawicki and Sawicki 1986 ). There are several coronaviruses; however, only seven have been found to be extremely hazardous to humans, the most popular being severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-COV), middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-COV) (Wong et al. 2015 ; Cattivelli and Rusciano 2020 ; Gallardo et al. 2020 ; Lee 2020 ), and currently COVID-19 (also known as SARS-COV-2). The latter is more dangerous because it has both MERS-COV and SARS-COV characteristics. Cold weather prevents the fragile COVID-19 casing from drying out, enabling the virus to live between hosts for longer (Banik et al. 2020 ). At the same time, sunlight UV exposure can affect the housing, which is disarming to the virus, although these seasonal variations are more important for known infections (Shirbandi et al. 2020 ). Not many are immune to a new virus, though; therefore, it has so many potential hosts that it does not need idle spreading conditions. For this reason, COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020.