The outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome called the coronavirus (COVID-19) in December 2019 brought the entire world to a halt resulting in a global pandemic. Throughout the pandemic period which is still ongoing as of October 2020, it was observed that the recovery periods for individuals affected by the virus have been inconsistent in different regions around the world. Motivated by this irregularity in recovery periods, this paper presents an inverse linear association between the quality of air measured in terms of Air Quality Index (AQI) of a particular city or region and the average recovery period of individuals residing in that city or region. The poorer the air quality in a particular region, that is, higher is the AQI, faster is the recovery period for an average individual residing in that region. The scope of the dataset is limited to a group of cities in India, for which the corresponding air quality data provided and maintained by the World Air Quality Index (WAQI) project team and COVID-19 data provided by official government handles was available. Data collection and corroboration accompanied with programmatic data preprocessing and analysis was performed. Linear regression (LR) was used to quantify and forecast the recovery period in a particular city based on the AQI of that city calculated over a period of time. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
Correlation Between Air Quality Index and COVID-19 Recovery Period in India