Initially High Correlation between Air Pollution and COVID-19 Mortality Declined to Zero as the Pandemic Progressed: There Is No Evidence for a Causal Link between Air Pollution and COVID-19 Vulnerability

Brandon Michael Taylor (), Michael Ash and Lawrence Peter King
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Brandon Michael Taylor: Economics Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
Michael Ash: Economics Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
Lawrence Peter King: Economics Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, USA

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 16, 1-9

Abstract: Wu et al. found a strong positive association between cumulative daily county-level COVID-19 mortality and long-term average PM 2.5 concentrations for data up until September 2020. We replicated the results of Wu et al. and extended the analysis up until May 2022. The association between PM 2.5 concentration and cumulative COVID-19 mortality fell sharply after September 2020. Using the data available from Wu et al.’s “updated_data” branch up until May 2022, we found that the effect of a 1 μg/m 3 increase in PM 2.5 was associated with only a +0.603% mortality difference. The 95% CI of this difference was between −0.560% and +1.78%, narrow bounds that include zero, with the upper bound far below the Wu et al. estimate. Short-term trends in the initial spread of COVID-19, not a long-term epidemiologic association, caused an early correlation between air pollution and COVID-19 mortality.

Keywords: COVID-19; PM 2.5; air pollution; mortality; epidemiology; multiple regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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