Air pollution and COVID-19 mortality in the United States: Strengths and limitations of an ecological regression analysis.

ABSTRACT: Assessing whether long-term exposure to air pollution increases the severity of COVID-19 health outcomes, including death, is an important public health objective. Limitations in COVID-19 data availability and quality remain obstacles to conducting conclusive studies on this topic. At present, publicly available COVID-19 outcome data for representative populations are available only as area-level counts. Therefore, studies of long-term exposure to air pollution and COVID-19 outcomes using these data must use an ecological regression analysis, which precludes controlling for individual-level COVID-19 risk factors. We describe these challenges in the context of one of the first preliminary investigations of this question in the United States, where we found that higher historical PM2.5 expos

SUBMITTER: Wu X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7673673 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature