Can atmospheric pollution be considered a co-factor in extremely high level of SARS-CoV-2 lethality in Northern Italy?
By E. Conticini, Bruno Frediani, D. Caro. Environmental Pollution, 2020
821 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper investigates the correlation between the high level of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome CoronaVirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) lethality and the atmospheric pollution in Northern Italy. Indeed, Lombardy and Emilia Romagna are Italian regions with both the highest level of virus lethality in the world and one of Europe’s most polluted area. Based on this correlation, this paper analyzes the possible link between pollution and the development of acute respiratory distress syndrome and eventually death. We provide evidence that people living in an area with high levels of pollutant are more prone to develop chronic respiratory conditions and suitable to any infective agent. Moreover, a prolonged exposure to air pollution leads to a chronic inflammatory stimulus, even in young and healthy subjects. We conclude that the high level of pollution in Northern Italy should be considered an additional co-factor of the high level of lethality recorded in that area.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Modeling and Simulation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df4a1ebe7dbabef5a187af3c7f76a81c9145fc21
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Citations in the corpus
- Recent Insights into Particulate Matter (PM2.5)-Mediated Toxicity in Humans: An Overview (2022, background): “The normally high concentrations of air pollution in Northern Italy have been determined to be an additional co-factor of the high level of lethality documented in that location [203].”
- Air pollution and COVID-19 mortality in the United States: Strengths and limitations of an ecological regression analysis (2020, methodology): “Two studies have been published using data from European countries (7, 8), and many more are available as preprints.”
- COVID-19 lockdowns cause global air pollution declines (2020, neutral): “United Kingdom 9 [5; 13]* 18 [12; 24] 0 [0; 0] 73 [58; 88]* 5 [3; 7] 0 [0; 0]”
- A brief review of socio-economic and environmental impact of Covid-19 (2020, neutral): “After analyzing the air quality index in Italy, Conticini et al. (2020) concluded that PM2.”
- Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on socio-economic, energy-environment and transport sector globally and sustainable development goal (SDG) (2021, neutral): “The author claimed that a potential positive correlation between COVID-19 cases and pollution was present in that region (Conticini et al., 2020).”