Gianquintieri Lorenzo, Brovelli Maria Antonia, Pagliosa Andrea, Bonora Rodolfo, Sechi Giuseppe Maria, Caiani Enrico Gianluca
Electronics, Information and Biomedical Engineering Department, Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milano, Italy.
Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milano, Italy.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2021 Nov 19;18(22):12154. doi: 10.3390/ijerph182212154.
the Lombardy region in Italy was the first area in Europe to record an outbreak of COVID-19 and one of the most affected worldwide. As this territory is strongly polluted, it was hypothesized that pollution had a role in facilitating the diffusion of the epidemic, but results are uncertain.
the paper explores the effect of air pollutants in the first spread of COVID-19 in Lombardy, with a novel geomatics approach addressing the possible confounding factors, the reliability of data, the measurement of diffusion speed, and the biasing effect of the lockdown measures.
all municipalities were assigned to one of five possible territorial classes (TC) according to land-use and socio-economic status, and they were grouped into districts of 100,000 residents. For each district, the speed of COVID-19 diffusion was estimated from the ambulance dispatches and related to indicators of mean concentration of air pollutants over 1, 6, and 12 months, grouping districts in the same TC. Significant exponential correlations were found for ammonia (NH) in both prevalently agricultural (R = 0.565) and mildly urbanized (R = 0.688) areas.
this is the first study relating COVID-19 estimated speed of diffusion with indicators of exposure to NH. As NH could induce oxidative stress, its role in creating a pre-existing fragility that could have facilitated SARS-CoV-2 replication and worsening of patient conditions could be speculated.
意大利伦巴第大区是欧洲首个记录到新冠疫情爆发的地区，也是全球受影响最严重的地区之一。由于该地区污染严重，有人推测污染在促进疫情传播方面起到了作用，但结果尚不确定。
本文采用一种新颖的地理信息学方法，探讨空气污染物在伦巴第大区新冠疫情首次传播中的影响，该方法考虑了可能的混杂因素、数据的可靠性、传播速度的测量以及封锁措施的偏差效应。
根据土地利用和社会经济状况，将所有市镇划分为五种可能的地域类别（TC）之一，并将它们分组为居民人数达10万的区。对于每个区，根据救护车调度情况估算新冠疫情的传播速度，并将其与1个月、6个月和12个月期间空气污染物平均浓度指标相关联，将同一TC中的区进行分组。在主要为农业区（R = 0.565）和轻度城市化地区（R = 0.688），均发现氨（NH）存在显著的指数相关性。
这是第一项将新冠疫情估计传播速度与NH暴露指标相关联的研究。由于NH可诱导氧化应激，因此可以推测其在造成先前存在的脆弱性方面所起的作用，这种脆弱性可能促进了SARS-CoV-2的复制并使患者病情恶化。
