Associations between air pollution and COVID-19 epidemic during quarantine period in China

Abstract

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a global public health threaten. A series of strict prevention and control measures were implemented in China, contributing to the improvement of air quality. In this study, we described the trend of air pollutant concentrations and the incidence of COVID-19 during the epidemic and applied generalized additive models (GAMs) to assess the association between short-term exposure to air pollution and daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 in 235 Chinese cities. Disease progression based on both onset and report dates as well as control measures as potential confounding were considered in the analyses. We found that stringent prevention and control measures intending to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, contributed to a significant decline in the concentrations of air pollutants except ozone (O 3 ). Significant positive associations of short-term exposure to air pollutants, including particulate matter with diameters ≤2.5μm (PM 2.5 ), particulate matter with diameters ≤10μm (PM 10 ), and nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) with daily new confirmed cases were observed during the epidemic. Per interquartile range (IQR) increase in PM 2.5 (lag0-15), PM 10 (lag0-15), and NO 2 (lag0-20) were associated with a 7% [95% confidence interval (CI): (4 - 9)], 6% [95% CI: (3 - 8)], and 19% [95% CI: (13 - 24)] increase in the counts of daily onset cases, respectively. Our results suggest that there is a statistically significant association between ambient air pollution and the spread of COVID-19. Thus, the quarantine measures can not only cut off the transmission of virus, but also retard the spread by improving ambient air quality, which might provide implications for the prevention and control of COVID-19.

Negative-Binomial and Quasi-Poisson regressions between COVID-19, mobility and environment in São Paulo, Brazil

“…Another study in China showed that 10 μg·m -3 of O 3 results in relative risk of 1.047 (Zhu et al 2020), which is slightly lower than our results of 1.075 presented in this study. Finally, Zhang et al (2021) found a country-average relative risk for PM 2.5 of 1.06 (95% CI: 1.03 to 1.08), while relative risk found in Northeast and Southwest China oscillate around 1.2, similar to our result 1.140. Therefore, our results are in agreement with other studies.…”

Does the combining effects of energy and consideration of financial development lead to environmental burden: social perspective of energy finance?

“…As a consequence, together with the digitalization of the economy. According to Trotta (2018) and Zhang et al (2021), another significant determinant of promoting progress is the security of innovations and imagination. However, financial risk must be reduced in order to foster innovations by digitalization in the economy and business-financed R&D investment.…”

Geographic Distribution of Excess Mortality Rate Duo to COVID-19 in Iranian Population: An Ecological Study

“…The reason for this can be considered as air pollution and also the less connection of these provinces with Qom and Tehran provinces (first provinces that reported COVID-19 in Iran). Previous studies have reported a negative association between Air Quality and COVID-19 death (20)(21)(22). Two limitations of this study were 1-not reporting information about death by INOCR and 2-Lack of reporting of COVID-19 death according to provinces by MoHME.…”