Air pollution poses a major threat to public health, having been associated with higher rates of heart disease, stroke, and respiratory illness. Now, new research also links it to worse outcomes of COVID-19.
In a study published May 24 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, researchers looked at data from about 151,000 Canadians who tested positive for COVID-19 in Ontario and calculated their exposure to air pollution by looking at their addresses for the five years before the pandemic and assessing the air pollution in that area. It’s an imperfect metric, the study authors acknowledge; individuals’ pollutant exposure differs even within the same region, since people’s activities and travel vary. But people who had a residential address in areas with high levels of common air pollutants were more likely to have severe COVID-19 outcomes, including hospitalization, ICU admission, and death.
The strongest associations were for ground-level ozone, which is gaseous pollution created in a reaction between pollutants in sun and air. People who lived in places with high levels were more likely to be hospitalized, admitted to the ICU, and even die after a COVID-19 diagnosis compared to people who lived in places with lower levels, the researchers found....
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