ABSTRACT
The present pandemic coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) becomes a serious concern of global health threat which is elicited by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2). This paper focuses on a hitherto untouched material’s engineering issue in human scientific fight against the well-known COVID-19. We show here the challenges and possibilities in engineering the surface to fight against survivability of SARS-CoV-2 that has caused a global pandemic. It is a fact that this virus causes severe acute respiratory syndrome and hence is nicknamed as e.g. SARS-CoV-2. In this perspective; the present work provides a critical survey about the severity of indirect contact mode transmission and survivability of various coronavirus families on different material surfaces. Furthermore, the possible direction for future research needed to develop antiviral material surfaces that can be regularly used to tackle such pandemic outbreaks is identified. Finally, the missing link between the biologist’s approach and the material scientist’s approach in tackling such pandemics is discussed along with scopes and challenges in future interdisciplinary research.
Acknowledgements
Authors MAH and AD are thankful to the Director, URSC/ISRO and Deputy Director, MSA/URSC/ISRO for the encouragement towards this review work. One of the authors (AKM) acknowledges the kind permissions of Professor G. K. Prabhu, President and Professor N. N. Sharma, Pro-President, Manipal University Jaipur, Jaipur – 303007, Rajasthan, India to publish this paper. Furthermore, author ACME would like to thank Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany for the post-doctoral research fellowship support.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).