This can increase the risk of transmitting viruses. Population densityĬities are defined by their crowded nature people living, travelling, working and studying in close quarters means more passive human-to-human contact. So why do cities provide ideal conditions for infectious diseases to spread? As more people have moved to cities, population density, human encroachment and increased global interconnectivity have contributed to the spread of infectious diseases. While these are examples of how urbanisation can make responding to a pandemic challenging, urbanisation can also increase the likelihood of pandemics. People who rely on informal incomes have no financial safety net from their place of work and cannot self-isolate because they need to provide for themselves and their families. This can be due to a range of factors including: limited access to clean water and sanitation, which makes regular handwashing difficult to achieve high population density, where large slums with several generations living under a single roof make physical distancing impossible and a large proportion of the population being dependant on the informal economy. However, for many people living in urban areas in low- and middle-income countries such restrictions often are not feasible or practical to follow. These guidelines include physical distancing, frequent handwashing and self-isolation. When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic in March this year, it issued guidelines on how to reduce transmission. In the coming decades, this is set to be inverted, with 68% of the global population projected to live in urban areas by 2050. Cities have seen a significant influx from rural areas over the years in 1950 one-third of the world’s population lived in cities and the rest in rural areas. For decades, cities have represented many opportunities for a better life employment and access to health care and education, to name a few.
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