Impact of meteorological conditions and air pollution on COVID-19 pandemic transmission in Italy

Abstract

Italy was the first, among all the European countries, to be strongly hit by the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (Sars-CoV-2). The virus, proven to be very contagious, infected more than 9 million people worldwide (in June 2020). Nevertheless, it is not clear the role of air pollution and meteorological conditions on virus transmission. In this study, we quantitatively assessed how the meteorological and air quality parameters are correlated to the COVID-19 transmission in two large metropolitan areas in Northern Italy as Milan and Florence and in the autonomous province of Trento. Milan, capital of Lombardy region, it is considered the epicenter of the virus outbreak in Italy. Our main findings highlight that temperature and humidity related variables are negatively correlated to the virus transmission, whereas air pollution (PM2.5) shows a positive correlation (at lesser degree). In other words, COVID-19 pandemic transmission prefers dry and cool environmental conditions, as well as polluted air. For those reasons, the virus might easier spread in unfiltered air-conditioned indoor environments. Those results will be supporting decision makers to contain new possible outbreaks.

The role of tropospheric Ozone in flagging COVID-19 pandemic transmission.

“…Florence shows a strong positive correlation. With respect to the meteorological parameters, the analysis corroborates the results found in a preliminary work performed only on Milan data (Lolli et al, 2020).…”

“…The correlations between COVID-19 pandemic, meteorological and air pollution variables were investigated using non-linear Spearman and Kendall rank correlation tests. The Spearman rank correlation non-parametric test is described as follows (Lolli et al, 2020): where represents the difference between the ranks of two parameters, and the number of alternatives.…”

“…We collected the main meteorological and air-pollution related variables from 1 February 2020 to 31 May 2020 in Milan, Trento, Florence and Rome. We tested the non-linear Kendall and Spearman correlations among those parameters and the residual number of the hospitalized patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) as shown in Lolli et al, 2020. The number of hospitalized patients in ICU unit is a much stronger indicator of COVID-19 pandemic transmission because it is independent of the number nasopharyngeal swabs performed.…”

“…This means that the daily number of ICU patients from 24 February 2020 to 14 June 2020 are the result of infections that happened from 10 February 2020 to 31 May 2020. The ICU per-day cases are modeled following the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) (Singhal et al, 2020, Lolli et al, 2020. The observational data show different trends with respect to time.…”

A correlation study between weather and atmosphere with COVID-19 pandemic in Islamabad, Pakistan

“…Various studies have considered atmospheric and metrological parameters in association with the COVID-19. The role of meteorological conditions and air pollution on the spread of COVID-19 in Italy's northern region, Lombardy, which was the regional epicenter of the pandemic outburst, was assessed quantitatively [23]. The Kendall rank and non-linear Spearman correlation tests were used for investigating the correlations among the air pollution, meteorological factors, and the COVID-19 virus.…”