Assessing the relationship between COVID-19, air quality, and meteorological variables: A case study of Dhaka city in Bangladesh

Md Sariful Islam; Mizanur Rahman; Tanmoy Roy Tusher; Shimul Roy; Mohammad Arfar Razi

doi:10.4209/aaqr.200609

Assessing the relationship between COVID-19, air quality, and meteorological variables : A case study of Dhaka city in Bangladesh

Research output: Journal Publications and Reviews (RGC: 21, 22, 62) › 21_Publication in refereed journal › peer-review

Overview

7 Scopus Citations

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Author(s)

Md Sariful Islam
Mizanur Rahman
Tanmoy Roy Tusher
Shimul Roy
Mohammad Arfar Razi

Related Research Unit(s)

School of Energy and Environment

Detail(s)

Original language	English
Article number	200609
Journal / Publication	Aerosol and Air Quality Research
Volume	21
Issue number	6
Online published	18 Jan 2021
Publication status	Published - Jun 2021

Link(s)

DOI	DOI https://doi.org/10.4209/aaqr.200609 Final Published version
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Attachment(s)	Documents 78117513.pdf Final Published version, 1.62 MB, PDF Publisher's Copyright Statement This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.
Link to Scopus	https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85107196305&origin=recordpage
Permanent Link	https://scholars.cityu.edu.hk/en/publications/publication(e0dd4f44-06df-41f6-b484-68a1743c6ca9).html

Abstract

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become a serious health concern worldwide for almost a year. This study investigated the effects of selected air pollutants and meteorological variables on daily COVID-19 cases in Dhaka city, Bangladesh. Air pollutants and meteorological data for Dhaka city were collected from 8 April to 16 June 2020 from multiple sources. This study implied spearman’s correlation to see the correlation between daily COVID-19 cases and different air pollutants and meteorological variables. Besides, multiple linear regression and the Generalized Additive Model (GAM) were used to investigate the association between COVID-19 cases and other variables used in this study. Due to lockdown measures, significant differences between PM_2.5, SO₂, NO₂, CO, and O₃ in 2019 and 2020 were observed in Dhaka city. We used lag-0, lag-7, lag-14, and lag-21 days on daily COVID-19 cases to look at the lag effect of different air pollutants and meteorology. The LRM results showed that the daily COVID-19 cases are significantly correlated with relative humidity (lag-0 days) and pressure (lag-14 days) (p < 0.05). Additionally, the GAM model results showed a significant nonlinear association among daily COVID-19 cases and meteorology and air quality variables on different lag days. Therefore, our results suggest that an effective public health intervention measures should be implemented to slowdown the spreading of COVID-19.