Year: 2022
Type: review
Abstract: Emerging evidence supports a link between environmental factors-including air pollution and chemical exposures, climate, and the built environment-and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) susceptibility and severity. Climate, air pollution, and the built environment have long been recognized to influence viral respiratory infections, and studies have established similar associations with COVID-19 outcomes. More limited evidence links chemical exposures to COVID-19. Environmental factors were found to influence COVID-19 through four major interlinking mechanisms: increased risk of preexisting conditions associated with disease severity; immune system impairment; viral survival and transport; and behaviors that increase viral exposure. Both data and methodologic issues complicate the investigation of these relationships, including reliance on coarse COVID-19 surveillance data; gaps in mechanistic studies; and the predominance of ecological designs. We evaluate the strength of evidence for environment-COVID-19 relationships and discuss environmental actions that might simultaneously address the COVID-19 pandemic, environmental determinants of health, and health disparities.
Source: Annual Review of Public Health
Language: English
Subfield: Global and Planetary Change
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Awards: G1343105583, G2215747378, G4476695680, G4724336502, Spatio-temporal data integration methods for infectious disease surveillance, EAGER: Collaborative Research: Rapid Production of Geospatial Network Inputs for Spatially Explicit Epidemiological Modeling of COVID-19 in the USA, Estimating the health benefits of national clean cooking fuel scale-up: A case study in Ecuador using national health data, G9000025443, G9000038344, G9000078813
OpenAlex ID: W4205802411