Yearly and daily relationship assessment between air pollution and early-stage COVID-19 incidence : evidence from 231 countries and regions

Abstract

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused significantly changes in worldwide environmental and socioeconomics, especially in the early stage. Previous research has found that air pollution is potentially affected by these unprecedented changes and it affects COVID-19 infections. This study aims to explore the non-linear association between yearly and daily global air pollution and the confirmed cases of COVID-19. The concentrations of tropospheric air pollution (CO, NO2, O3, and SO2) and the daily confirmed cases between 23 January 2020 and 31 May 2020 were collected at the global scale. The yearly discrepancies of air pollutions and daily air pollution are associated with total and daily confirmed cases, respectively, based on the generalized additive model. We observed that there are significant spatially and temporally non-stationary variations between air pollution and confirmed cases of COVID-19. For the yearly assessment, the number of confirmed cases is associated with the positive fluctuation of CO, O3, and SO2 discrepancies, while the increasing NO2 discrepancies leads to the significant peak of confirmed cases variation. For the daily assessment, among the selected countries, positive linear or non-linear relationships are found between CO and SO2 concentrations and the daily confirmed cases, whereas NO2 concentrations are negatively correlated with the daily confirmed cases; variations in the ascending/declining associations are identified from the relationship of the O3-confirmed cases. The findings indicate that the non-linear relationships between global air pollution and the confirmed cases of COVID-19 are varied, which implicates the needs as well as the incorporation of our findings in the risk monitoring of public health on local, regional, and global scales.