Associations of acute exposure to airborne pollutants with COVID-19 infection: evidence from China

The outbreak of COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2, has spread across many countries globally. Greatly, there are limited studies concerned with the effect of airborne pollutants on COVID-19 infection, while exposure to airborne pollutants may harm human health. This paper aimed to examine the associations of acute exposure to ambient atmospheric pollutants to daily newly COVID-19 confirmed cases in 41 Chinese cities. Using a generalized additive model with Poisson distribution controlling for temperature and relative humidity, we evaluated the association between pollutant concentrations and daily COVID-19 confirmation at single-city level and multicity levels. We observed a 10-μg/m(3) rise in levels of PM(2.5) (lag 0−14), O(3) (lag 0−1), SO(2) (lag 0), and NO(2) (lag 0−14) were positively associated with relative risks of 1.050 (95% CI: 1.028, 1.073), 1.011 (1.007, 1.015), 1.052 (1.022, 1.083), and 1.094 (1.028, 1.164) of daily newly confirmed cases, respectively. Further adjustment for other pollutants did not change the associations materially (excepting in the model for SO(2)). Our results indicated that COVID-19 incidence may be susceptible to airborne pollutants such as PM(2.5), O(3), SO(2), and NO(2), and mitigation strategies of environmental factors are required to prevent spreading. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11356-021-14159-z.