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Background: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an invisible enemy that has made
people observe issues such as eating habits, personal hygiene, and environmental factors that
may affect their immune systems.
Objectives: Because air pollution can affect the immune system, it is necessary to examine
the relationship between air quality parameters...
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Under the rapid spread of coronavirus diseases (COVID-19) worldwide, a complete lockdown was imposed in France from March 17th to May 11th, 2020 to limit the virus spread. This lockdown affected significantly the atmospheric pollution levels due to the restrictions of human activities. In the present study, we investigate the evolution of air quali...
Citations
... Although there is no study that directly examines the relationship between the number of Covid-19 cases and air pollutants in Turkey, there are some studies on air pollution and Covid-19 pandemics for different provinces and regions of Turkey. Sahin [24] used correlation analysis to examine the difference between the number of Covid-19 cases and some air pollutant parameters for 9 big cities in Turkey and found a positive significant relationship between the SO 2 indicator and the number of Covid-19 cases. Dursun et al. [25] investigated the effects of the measures taken during the Covid-19 pandemic (travel restriction, curfew, online education etc.) on air quality for 29 major cities and Zonguldak in Turkey. ...
The Covid-19 pandemic, which has been affecting the world since December 2019, has become one of the biggest problems of the 21st century. There are studies stating that the contagiousness of the Covid-19 pandemic, which is transmitted from person to person, increases more with environmental factors such as air pollution, and accordingly, there is an increase in the number of cases. In this study, a panel regression model to investigate the effect of air pollution concentrations such as PM10 and SO2 as environmental factors and population density on the monthly mean number of Covid-19 cases for 12 regions at the nomenclature of territorial units for statistics (NUTS) level 1 in Turkey between June 2020 and November 2020, and a linear regression model to investigate the effect at the regional level. we used. Based on the model results, we concluded that a small increase in air pollution indicators led to an increase in the number of Covid-19 cases in Turkey and its regions. It is very important to identify preventable environmental factors in order to prevent and minimize the effects of respiratory tract diseases and rapidly spreading pandemic diseases such as Covid-19. Accordingly, we can conclude that countries should take some measures, especially on air pollution, in order to develop public health and pandemic/disease management strategies and to reduce the risk of respiratory diseases.
... In addition, the curfew on weekends and official and religious holidays continues throughout the country, especially in metropolitan cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, and Konya. Despite drastic measures, the number of confirmed cases continued to increase (Aydın et al., 2021;Şahin, 2020). ...
Different health management strategies may need to be implemented in different regions to cope with diseases. The current work aims to evaluate the relationship between air quality parameters and the number of new COVID-19 cases in two different geographical locations, namely Western Anatolia and Western Black Sea in Turkey. Principal component analysis (PCA) and regression model were utilized to describe the effect of environmental parameters (air quality and meteorological parameters) on the number of new COVID-19 cases. A big difference in the mean values for all air quality parameters has appeared between the two areas. Two regression models were developed and showed a significant relationship between the number of new cases and the selected environmental parameters. The results showed that wind speed, SO2, CO, NOX, and O3 are not influential variable and does not affect the number of new cases of COVID-19 in the Western Black Sea area, while only wind speed, SO2, CO, NOX, and O3 are influential parameters on the number of new cases in Western Anatolia. Although the environmental parameters behave differently in each region, these results revealed that the relationship between the air quality parameters and the number of new cases is significant.
... Studies around the world have been conducted to investigate the effect of COVID-19 on air quality, some of these studies found that during COVID-19 air pollutants concentrations decreased such as NO2 (Chossiere et al., 2021, Ji and Chang, 2020, Sannino et al., 2020, PM10 (Anil and Alagha, 2021, Aljahdali et al., 2021, Şahin, 2020, Broomandi et al., 2020, both PM10 and PM2.5 (Collivignarelli et al., 2020, Garg et al., 2020, Ji and Chang, 2020, Kerimray et al., 2020, Mahato et al., 2020, Menut et al., 2020, Shakoor et al., 2020, Tobías et al., 2020, CO, SO2 (Garg et al., 2020, Sannino et al., 2020, NO and NOx (Garg et al., 2020), NH3, and C6H6 (Garg et al., 2020). However, concentrations of some pollutants increased such as O3 (Garg et al., 2020, Ji andChang, 2020) and SO2 (Ji and Chang, 2020), PM10 (Hashim et al., 2020, Shakoor et al., 2020 due to either anthropogenic sources or dust events. ...
Research have been conducted in many countries around the world to assess air quality during COVID-19 pandemic, especially during lockdown period, some of these studies found an increase or decrease in some pollutants. This paper investigates the impact of COVID-19 on seven air pollutants (i.e., PM2.5, PM10, NO2, O3, SO2, H2S, CO) from the period January 2020 to December 2020 in the State of Kuwait. Kuwait is a desert country located in the northeastern part of the Arabian Peninsula, and the northeast of the Arabian Gulf (Persian as it is sometimes called). Several analytical methods were conducted, such as spatial analysis (spatial interpolation) to study the distribution of the studied variables. The data was also statistically analysed (time series analysis-Kernel density) to study the temporal changes. The analysis also included applying air quality index to the data. We found that concentrations for the pollutants decreased during the pandemic due to the decrease of anthropogenic sources including such as traffic and petroleum activities, but the concentration for PM2.5 increased, mostly because of the transported dust coming with the northwest winds prevailing in Kuwait from the Arabian deserts and Iraq.
... For instance, compared with the lockdown period, the eastern province of Saudi Arabia and its capital (Riyadh) recorded lower PM 10 levels, by 27-70% [6] and 91% [7], respectively. Lower PM 10 concentrations were also recorded in nine provinces in Turkey [8] and Tehran, Iran [9]. Several other studies outside the region of the Arabian Peninsula have also reported a significant decline in PM 2.5 and PM 10 ; for instance, Almaty, Kazakhstan [10], Milan, Italy [11], Barcelona, Spain [12], Delhi, India [13], western Europe [14], China [15], and the 50 most polluted cities in the world [16]. ...
This study investigated the impact of COVID-19 lockdown on particulate matter concentrations, specifically PM2.5 and PM10, in Kuwait. We studied the variations in PM2.5 and PM10 between the lockdown in 2020 with the corresponding periods of the years 2017–2019, and also investigated the differences in PM variations between the ‘curfew’ and ‘non curfew’ hours. We applied mixed-effect regression to investigate the factors that dictate PM variability (i.e., dust and meteorological covariates), and also processed satellite-based aerosol optical depths (AOD) to determine the spatial variability in aerosol loads. The results showed low PM2.5 concentration during the lockdown (33 μg/m³) compared to the corresponding previous three years (2017–2019); however, the PM10 concentration (122.5 μg/m³) increased relative to 2017 (116.6 μg/m³), and 2019 (92.8 μg/m³). After removing the ‘dust effects’, both PM2.5 and PM10 levels dropped by 18% and 31%, respectively. The mixed-effect regression model showed that high temperature and high wind speed were the main contributors to high PM2.5 and PM10, respectively, in addition to the dust haze and blowing dust. This study highlights that the reductions of anthropogenic source emissions are overwhelmed by dust events and adverse meteorology in arid regions, and that the lockdown did not reduce the high concentrations of PM in Kuwait.
The nexus of the ambient air quality and the COVID-19 pandemic is a topic that has attracted much attention and remains of current interest. The study area of Turkey is one of the countries with high case numbers, but there is no detailed investigation dealing with it in the literature. For this reason, the correlation and links between COVID-19 cases and deaths in Turkey with the air pollutants of PM10, PM2.5, SO2, CO, NO2 and O3 were determined between 1 April and 31 July 2021 using the statistical methods of cross-correlation and wavelet coherence analysis. According to the findings, for the COVID-19 pandemic parameters, there were positive significant correlations with PM2.5, SO2, CO, and NO2 and an inverse significant correlation with O3. Although the wavelet transform is not convincing to suggest a standalone coherence, it reveals that air pollution and the spread and mortality of the pandemic in Turkey have short-term periods of co-movement. Additionally, it is notable that the national air quality improved during full lockdown periods in the country. The findings obtained in this study are expected to attract the attention of legislating and enforcing authorities and support more decisive steps being taken to reduce environmental pollutants and to control air pollution.
The effect of the ambient air quality on the COVID-19 pandemic is a topic that has attracted much attention and still remains of current interest. The study area of Turkey is one of the countries with high case numbers, but there is no detailed investigation dealing with it in the literature. For this reason, the correlation and nexus between COVID-19 cases and deaths in Turkey with the air pollutants of PM 10 , PM 2.5 , SO 2 , CO, NO 2 and O 3 were determined between 1 April and 31 July 2021 using the statistical methods of correlation and wavelet coherence analysis. According to the findings, for the COVID-19 pandemic parameters, there were positive significant correlations with PM 2.5 , SO 2 , CO, and NO 2 and an inverse significant correlation with O 3 . Wavelet transform coherence revealed that air pollution, which has significant effects on human life, was one of the main determinants of the spread and mortality linked to the pandemic. Additionally, it is notable that the national air quality improved during full lockdown periods in the country. The findings obtained in this study are expected to attract the attention of legislating and enforcing authorities and support more decisive steps being taken to reduce environmental pollutants and to control air pollution.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which has reached 4 million global cases as of March 10, 2020, has become a worldwide problem. Turkey is one of the most affected (9th in the world) country with 139 771 cases. An intermittent curfew policy that differ for three age groups, and an intercity travel ban varying within the country have been implemented. The effects of changes in social life and industrial activity in terms of environmental pollution are not yet known. The short-term effects on PM2.5, PM10, SO2, NO2, NO, NOx, O3 and CO concentrations measured at 51 air quality measurement stations (AQMS) in 11 cities in March – April period of 2020 were statistically compared with that of the previous year. While PM2.5 (9/14 AQMS) and PM10 (29/35 AQMS) concentrations were not significantly affected, NO (12/24 AQMS), NO2 (20/29 AQMS), NOX (17/25 AQMS) concentrations were decreased, SO2 concentrations at half of the AQMSs (11/25) did not show a significant change. There were stations at which higher pollutant concentrations were measured in the study period in 2020 compared to that of 2019. Excess risks associated with PM2.5 and PM10 were estimated to be variable, albeit with a small difference. In conclusion, the heterogeneous actions taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in mixed effects on ambient air quality.
