Over the entire year of 2020, COVID-19 has grown into a fully blown pandemic, which poses a global risk to our health and global economies. The disease was first observed in December 2019 around Wuhan and is caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). By March 11th, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 as a pandemic (World Health Organization, 2020). As of February 9th, 2021, there are 105.8 million confirmed cases and more than 2.3 million fatalities that were related to COVID-19. The long-term effects of COVID-19 are still unforeseeable, but the impact in the year 2020 alone is remarkable: The pandemic is estimated to have caused the largest global recession since the severe worldwide economic downturn in the 1930s (the Great Depression), with millions of people falling into extreme poverty.

The disease spread with quite rapidity across the entire globe. No nation stood unharmed by the global pandemic. The air transport system aided to the further spread of the disease from one land to another, one geographical area to another.
Air transport indeed played quite a vital role in furthering the covid cases across India as well. People affected with various novice strains in different countries travelled to India and thus contributed significantly to the rapid spread of the virus and its various new strains so formed by mutation. Eventually, the government was forced to surcease the international flights from all the countries. This in a way controlled the uncontrolled spread of the virus to some extent but unfortunately displayed a terrible impact on the economic structure of our nation. The GDP and overall economic growth manifestated a severe decline in economic activities across the nation.

Thus to conclude, air transport genuinely served a negative impact on the biological as well as economic health of our nation.
© Dipanjan