Satellite data and machine learning reveal a significant correlation between NO2 and COVID-19 mortality

Abstract

The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has officially spread all over the world since the beginning of 2020. Although huge efforts are addressed by scientists to shed light over the several questions raised by the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus, many aspects need to be clarified, yet. In particular, several studies have pointed out significant variations between countries in per-capita mortality. In this work, we investigated the association between COVID-19 mortality with climate variables and air pollution throughout European countries using the satellite remote sensing images provided by the Sentinel-5p mission. We analyzed data collected for two years of observations and extracted the concentrations of several pollutants; we used these measurements to feed a Random Forest regression. We performed a cross-validation analysis to assess the robustness of the model and compared several regression strategies. Our findings reveal a significant statistical association between air pollution (NO 2 ) and COVID-19 mortality and a significant role played by the socio-demographic features, like the number of nurses or the hospital beds and the gross domestic product per capita.

Towards Integrated Air Pollution Monitoring and Health Impact Assessment Using Federated Learning: A Systematic Review

“…From the review summarized above, we can conclude the health hazard of air pollutions were diverse. From the recent findings of Amoroso et al ( 4 ), Cazzolla Gatti et al ( 6 ), Hadei et al ( 7 ), Sethi et al ( 12 ), air pollution brings impacts on human health as well as to the Covid-19 related hazards. The studies showed that the air pollution affected the mortality and fatalities of the Covid-19 patients, as well as the infected rate or morbidity of Covid-19 with the presence of pollutants in the air.…”

“…The majority of the studies conducted had analyzed the impact of particulate matter (PM 2.5 , PM 10 , PM <2.5 ) on human health ( 3 , 5 – 18 , 28 ). Pollution markers such as ozone (O 3 ), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO 2 ) and sulfur dioxide (SO 2 ) are among other important contaminants that were studied by ( 2 – 4 , 6 , 7 , 10 – 15 ). Chemicals such as nitrogen oxides (NO x ) also played crucial roles in causing adverse health effects in humans, for instance, cardiorespiratory diseases and cancers.…”

“…In addition, from the study completed by ( 12 ), toluene and ammonia (NH 3 ) are important parameters in determining the effect of air pollution on the mortality of Covid-19 during air pollution seasons. On the other hand, ( 4 ) have explored a new perspective in predicting chemical compounds such as methane (CH 4 ), formaldehyde (CH 2 O), aerosol and their association to Covid-19 mortality during air pollution.…”

Elucidating the role of environmental management of forests, air quality, solid waste and wastewater on the dissemination of SARS-CoV-2

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Correlação entre Indicadores Socioeconômicos e a COVID-19: uma revisão sistemática da literatura

“…O objetivo de [Amoroso et al 2021] foi avaliar a existência de associac ¸ão estatística entre a exposic ¸ão a poluentes e a mortalidade por COVID-19. Foram coletados três tipos distintos de dados, as concentrac ¸ões de poluentes recuperadas dos dados S-5p (monitoramento da atmosfera da Terra, da qualidade do ar, do clima e da camada de ozônio), dados climáticos do ERA5(cobertura completa das variáveis climáticas em toda a Europa) e os dados que caracterizam o contexto socioeconômico, incluindo taxas de mortalidade, coletados em vários repositórios online.…”