Ambient Air Pollution and COVID-19 Disease Severity or Death among Confirmed Cases in Southern California
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Principal Investigator/Author: Michael Jerrett
Contractor: University of California, Los Angeles
Contract Number: 19RD030
Project Status: Completed
Relevant CARB Programs: Health & Exposure
Topic Areas: Health Effects of Air Pollution, Health & Air Pollution
Research Summary:
The COVID-19 pandemic represents one of the largest threats to population health in more than a century. Biologically plausible reasons suggest that air pollution may make people more susceptible to contracting COVID-19, and once they have the disease, air pollution exposure may contribute to a worse prognosis. The objective of the study is to assess whether air pollution exposures lead to worse outcomes in confirmed COVID-19 cases among members of the Kaiser Permanente Southern California (KPSC) HMO. The wealth of individual information on the members of this cohort can help to determine the role of air pollution exposure in a worsening of COVID-19 disease including admission to hospital, admission to the ICU, advanced oxygen treatment or being put on a ventilator, and death in hospital. The individual information included in the health data will enable the investigators to examine whether exposure gradients along socioeconomic status, race, and ethnicity are partly responsible for a worse prognosis of some patient groups (e.g., non-whites) as well as examining the impacts of preexisting conditions. Contractors will use advanced land use regression exposure modeling to estimate ambient concentrations of several common air pollutants, including NO2, PM2.5, and O3. Contractors will also use chemical transport models (CTMs) to estimate speciated fine and ultra-fine particles. These CTMs also enable researchers to examine specific sources of the particles, and to link these estimates to all confirmed cases in the KPSC database. These data will be to assess whether higher chronic air pollution contributes to worse COVID-19 progression in diagnosed patients.
Keywords: COVID-19; PM2.5; mortality; severity; multi-state model; Southern California
Related Research:
Final Report: Please email research@arb.ca.gov to request the Final Report generated by this research contract.