Air quality plays a crucial role in the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, a study has said while suggesting that improving it with proper strict regulations whenever infections peak could help reduce virus spread and mortality rates.
Spanning over one year (April 2020 to March 2021) involving 300 districts including Hyderabad, Vijayawada and Visakhapatnam covering summer, monsoon and winter seasons, the study reveals that among the air pollutants, atmospheric ozone was better correlated with infection counts followed by aerosol thickness, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, black carbon and sulphur dioxide.
The researchers observed that among the weather parameters, air temperature, incoming short-wave radiation, wind speed are positively and significantly associated with outbreak patterns, while precipitation (rainfall) and humidity are negatively correlated with confirmed cases.
“Coastal districts and areas located in the plain and low-lying areas experienced a bitter situation during this pandemic”, said the study published in online preprint portal MedRxiv on July1.
The spatial distribution of cases also depicted that the coastal districts were more anguished by misfortune than the districts located in the interior part of the country whereas the districts from the Himalayan Mountains and its foothills had lesser strife during this pandemic.
For instance, among other areas, Andhra Pradesh had inhaled quite bad air. “This also explains why AP, being primarily a coastal state, has reported more Covid-19 infections than Telangana, which is far away from the coast,” said the study.
The research team comprising Amitesh Gupta and Laboni Saha from Savitribai Phule Pune University, and RBased Services
Private Limited, Delhi, investigated the role of regional meteorology and air quality parameters in the outbreak pattern of Covid-19 pandemic.
They used the remote sensing-based dataset of 12 environmental variables to correlate infective case counts at the district level.