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. 2022 Mar;204(Pt B):112098.
doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2021.112098. Epub 2021 Sep 25.

A global assessment of COVID-19 diffusion based on a single indicator: Some considerations about air pollution and COVID-19 spread

Elza Bontempi  1
Affiliations

A global assessment of COVID-19 diffusion based on a single indicator: Some considerations about air pollution and COVID-19 spread

Elza Bontempi. Environ Res. 2022 Mar.

Abstract

The extraordinariness of COVID-19 occurred in a world that was completely unprepared to face it. To justify this, sometimes literature proposes positive associations between concentrations of some air pollutants and SARS-CoV-2 mortality and infectivity. However, several of these studies are affected by incomplete data analysis and/or incorrect accounts of spread dynamics that can be attributed to respiratory viruses. Based on separate analyses involving all the USA states and globally all the world countries suffering from the pandemic, this communication shows that commercial trade seems to be a good indicator of virus spread, being proposed as a surrogate of human-to-human interactions. The results of this study strongly support the conclusion that this new indicator could result fundamental to model (and avoid) possible future pandemics, strongly suggesting dedicated studies devoted to better investigate its significance.

Keywords: Air pollution; COVID-19 spread; Commercial trade; PM(2.5); SARS-CoV-2.

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Conflict of interest statement

The author declares that she has no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Image 1
Graphical abstract
Fig. 1
Fig. 1
a) 2017 International trade data (the sum of total amount of import and export) expressed in US$, for all the USA states; b) cumulative detected COVID-19 infection cases in all the USA states (on July 02, 2021); c) cumulative detected COVID-19 deaths in all the USA states (on July 02, 2021).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Cumulative detected COVID-19 infection cases in all the world countries (on July 05, 2021) versus the 2017 international trade data (the sum of the total amount of import and export) expressed in US$. For both axes, the data are reported in a logarithmic scale. Countries distribution with the higher infection cases can be interpolated by L1 line (the names are reported in black colour). On the contrary, countries' distribution corresponding to lower virus spread can be interpolated by L2 line (the names are reported in red colour). L1 and L2 have different intercepts (C1 and C2). Some country's names corresponding to L1 distribution are highlighted: the names reported in blue colour (in the top) indicate countries with higher COVID-19 diffusion (for example Brazil and India) and the names reported in green (in the bottom) indicate some countries that can be also mentioned (for example Germany and Canada). (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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