What we do and do not know about the links between air pollution and COVID-19 (draft 1)

 

Alistair Lewis, an atmospheric scientist, reported in The conversion (13 May, 2020) that connecting air pollution and coronavirus is superficial. She states that correlating the two “have often failed to take other geographically-connected factors into account”. She says that air pollution in rich countries is “usually a population-centred problem”, this close link between cities and air pollution makes it hard to identify how pollution effects the mortality of COVID-19. She then focuses on urban areas, stating that they face similar situations through the regular use of mass transit system. Air pollution data is one of the only legitimate data that is easily accessible, leading to one having the misconception that air pollution has a proportionate effect on COVID-19 while referring to the data. The writer believes that more datasets will appear in future to allow one to study the connections between air pollution and COVID-19. Until that happens, she believes that connecting the two is inaccurate. While I agree with Alistiar Lewis's comment, I believe in the past few months ever since she made her comment, many more data have been produced to prove the links between Air pollution and COVID-19.

I do agree with Lewis ‘report, however I am still not convinced that links between air pollution and corona virus does not exist. According to Elsevier public health emergency collection, it made a hypothesis saying “Here we propose a hypothesis linking PM 2.5 and NO2 concentrations and the severity of SARS-CoV-2 which could have important implications in the prevention and management of the pandemic.” The report is then accompanied with detailed report and proves of the links between air pollution and corona virus. They presented their studies with a graph, it compares the quality of air with the number of deaths. 


Reference : 

1. Lewis, A. (2020, May 13). What We Do and Don’t Know about the Links between Air Pollution and Coronavirus. What We Do and Don’t Know about the Links between Air Pollution and Coronavirus. Retrieved 2020, from https://theconversation.com/what-we-do-and-dont-know-about-the-links-between-air-pollution-and-coronavirus-137746


2.Frontera, A., Cianfanelli, L., Vlachos, K., Landoni, G., & Cremona, G. (2020, August). Severe air pollution links to higher mortality in COVID-19 patients: The "double-hit" hypothesis. Retrieved October 09, 2020, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7240268/


Comments

  1. Joel NeoOctober 5, 2020 at 6:41 PM

    Hi Dennis,

    In the sentence, "Air pollution data is one of the only legitimate data that is easily accessible, leading to one having the misconception that air pollution has an proportionate effect on of COVID-19 while referring to the data", the 'an' should be an 'a' instead as it is for proportionate and not effect. In the same sentence, the use of 'on' and 'of' beside each other sounds weird.

    ReplyDelete

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