Abstract
There is a rising concern that air pollution plays an important role in the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the results were not consistent on the association between air pollution and the spread of COVID-19. In the study, air pollution data and the confirmed cases of COVID-19 were both gathered from five severe cities across three countries in South America. Daily real-time population regeneration (Rt) was calculated to assess the spread of COVID-19. Two frequently used models, generalized additive models (GAM) and multiple linear regression, were both used to explore the impact of environmental pollutants on the epidemic. Wide ranges of all six air pollutants were detected across the five cities. Spearman’s correlation analysis confirmed the positive correlation within six pollutants. Rt value showed a gradual decline in all the five cities. Further analysis showed that the association between air pollution and COVID-19 varied across five cities. According to our research results, even for the same region, varied models gave inconsistent results. For example, in Sao Paulo, both models show SO2 and O3 are significant independent variables, however, the GAM model shows that PM10 has a nonlinear negative correlation with Rt, while PM10 has no significant correlation in the multiple linear model. Moreover, in the case of multiple regions, currently used models should be selected according to local conditions. Our results indicate that there is a significant relationship between air pollution and COVID-19 infection, which will help states, health practitioners, and policy makers in combating the COVID-19 pandemic in South America.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11356-021-15508-8.
Highlights
In late December 2019, a novel coronavirus, named COVID19, was first reported in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China (Daraei et al 2020; Lu et al 2020; Wu et al 2020)
Over the past few months, the South American region has become the central region of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the infection rate of COVID-19 has been increasing
According to the experiments and analysis results, this study has come to the following conclusions:(1) reproduction number (Rt), which can reflect the spread of COVID-19, showed a gradual decline in all the five regions
Summary
In late December 2019, a novel coronavirus, named COVID19, was first reported in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China (Daraei et al 2020; Lu et al 2020; Wu et al 2020). Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus 2 (SARS-CoV2) (Lu et al 2020) is the pathogenic agent of COVID-19 and most of the infected had clinical manifestations of fever and shortness of breath (Chen et al 2020). This epidemic has caused serious demographic changes and unemployment (Bashir et al 2020b). It has been confirmed COVID-19 can be transmitted through direct contact (human-to-human) (Chan et al 2020). A total of 20,871,160 patients with COVID-19 had been confirmed worldwide as of August 13, 2020, and 81 countries have more than 10,000 confirmed cases (https:// www.hopkinsmedicine.org/coronavirus). South America accounts for about 27% of the world’s confirmed cases, making it the region with the highest number of confirmed
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