https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-11/wuis-pap111220.php
News Release 12-Nov-2020
Washington University in St. Louis
The United States may have set itself up for the spread of a pandemic without even knowing it.
According to new research from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, pollution may bear part of the blame for the rapid proliferation in the United States of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the spread of COVID-19.
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When it comes to how ill someone gets after contracting COVID-19, medical professionals believe that a person's health -- having certain medical conditions, for example -- can play a vital role. When it comes to how fast the virus can spread through the community, it turns out the health of the environment is directly correlated to the basic reproduction ratio R0, which denotes the expected number of people each sick person can infect.
The reproduction ratio R0 of COVID-19 associates directly with the long-term ambient PM2.5 exposure levels. And the presence of secondary inorganic components in PM2.5 only makes things worse, according to Chakrabarty.
"We checked for more than 40 confounding factors," Chakrabarty said. Of all of those factors, "There was a strong, linear association between long-term PM2.5 exposure and R0."
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"Although decades of strict air quality regulations in the U.S. have resulted in significant reductions of nitrogen dioxide levels," the authors wrote in the paper's conclusion, "recent reversal of environmental regulations which weaken limits on gaseous emissions from power plants and vehicles threaten the country's future air quality scenario."
"Instead of working to resolve this issue, these reversals may be setting us up for another pandemic," Chakrabarty said.
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