Air Quality and COVID-19 mortality in the Chicago area
Year: 2020
Type: conference-abstract
Abstract: Background:In the United States, deaths caused by COVID-19 have occurred disproportionately in racial and ethnic minority populations. As no medical cure or natural immunity exists, understanding the factors that place people at higher risk of dying of COVID-19 is crucial to reducing mortality. Prelminary ecological analyses suggest that poor air quality may increase the risk of COVID-19 mortality, but thus far, this association has not been evaluated in with fine-scale spatial exposure resolution in a homogenously urban area. We aimed to interrogate the relationship between air quality and COVID-19 mortality in residents of Cook County, an area with high levels of racial and ethnic residential seggregation.Methods: High-resolution estimates of three air pollutants were developed for Cook County, Illinois (the Chicagoland area): particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns (PM2.5), ozone (O3), and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) utilizing a WRF-CMAQ model. The association of these air pollutants were associated with overall and race-specific COVID-19 death rates within each census tract controlling for tract-level confounders.Results: Race and ethnicity were highly correlated with the air pollutants (p<0.00001). An increased risk of COVID-19 mortality was found in tracts with higher PM2.5 (RR=1.26; p=1.19·10-5) and NO2 (RR=1.04; p=1.13·10-2) when controlling for tract-level gender, age, and proxies for exposure to the virus (public transit use, population density, and occupants per residential room). This effect persisted when controlling for congregate living such as nursing homes and jails. This effect was attenuated when controlling for other tract-level measures of socioeconomic status, and such measures were often highly correlated with air pollution.Conclusions: This analysis supports the hypothesis that air pollution may be associated with COVID-19 mortality. While individual-level analyses are needed, these findings support mitigation strategies that may reduce death rates in vulnerable population such as filtration and pollutant regulations.
Source: ISEE Conference Abstracts
Institutions: University of Illinois Chicago, Northwestern University
Language: English
Subfield: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3172468469