Early Spread of COVID-19 in the Air-Polluted Regions of Eight Severely Affected Countries

Abstract

COVID-19 escalated into a pandemic posing several humanitarian as well as scientific challenges. We here investigated the geographical character of the early spread of the infection and correlated it with several annual satellite and ground indexes of air quality in China, the United States, Italy, Iran, France, Spain, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The time of the analysis corresponded with the end of the first wave infection in China, namely June 2020. We found more viral infections in those areas afflicted by high PM 2.5 and nitrogen dioxide values. Higher mortality was also correlated with relatively poor air quality. In Italy, the correspondence between the Po Valley pollution and SARS-CoV-2 infections and induced mortality was the starkest, originating right in the most polluted European area. Spain and Germany did not present a noticeable gradient of pollution levels causing non-significant correlations. Densely populated areas were often hotspots of lower air quality levels but were not always correlated with a higher viral incidence. Air pollution has long been recognised as a high risk factor for several respiratory-related diseases and conditions, and it now appears to be a risk factor for COVID-19 as well. As such, air pollution should always be included as a factor for the study of airborne epidemics and further included in public health policies.

Short-term air pollution exposure and COVID-19 infection in the United States

“…Typically, long-term exposure refers to exposure to air pollution for years before the onset of the disease, while short-term exposure refers to exposure that occurs during the duration of a pandemic. Pansini and Fornacca (2021) have found significantly positive correlation between long-term air pollution exposure to COVID-19 infection across 8 nations. Wu et al (2020) conducted a study within the U.S. context using a multivariate regression model finding that long-term exposure to PM 2.5 was positively associated with COVID-19 mortality.…”

A Method to Generate Experimental Aerosol with Similar Particle Size Distribution to Atmospheric Aerosol

“…The wide spreading of the high infections disease, such as Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV), has attracted worldwide attention [1][2][3]. At present, COVID-19 is seriously threatening the health of people [4,5].…”

Geospatial Correlation Analysis between Air Pollution Indicators and Estimated Speed of COVID-19 Diffusion in the Lombardy Region (Italy)

“…The hypothesis of a correlation between air pollutant levels and COVID-19 diffusion has been widely addressed by recent scientific literature. Twenty different publications on this topic were identified [8,[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]: most of them (50%) were focused on Italy [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19], whereas three were focused on the USA [8,20,21], three on China [22][23][24], one on France [25], one on England [26], and two were cross-country (one on Europe [27] and one worldwide [28]). Six of these studies considered the effects of pollution on COVID-19 casualties [12,20,21,23,25,27], seven dealt with the number of confirmed infections …”

“…Six of these studies considered the effects of pollution on COVID-19 casualties [12,20,21,23,25,27], seven dealt with the number of confirmed infections [10,11,13,16,17,22,24], while the remaining seven took into consideration both infections and casualties [8,14,15,18,19,26,28]. The air pollutants considered in the analysis were particulate matter (PM 2.5 [8,[12][13][14][15][16]18,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26]28], and PM 10 [8,[10][11][12][15][16][17][18][22][23][24][25][26]), nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 [8,…”

“…The air pollutants considered in the analysis were particulate matter (PM 2.5 [8,[12][13][14][15][16]18,[20][21][22][23][24][25][26]28], and PM 10 [8,[10][11][12][15][16][17][18][22][23][24][25][26]), nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 [8,[12][13][14]16,19,20,22,24,[26][27][28]), sulfur dioxide (SO 2 [8,24]), ozone (O 3 [11,12,19,20,24,26]), carbon oxide (CO [8,22,24]), and nitrogen oxide (NO…”