There is a connection between poor air quality and severe Covid 19 courses: Those who live with high levels of particulate matter are particularly at risk.
- Anything that damages the lungs also increases the risk of serious or even fatal coronavirus infections.
- Smokers in particular are therefore at risk * - but also people who grow up in poor air or live in areas with high levels of particulate matter .
- Find out here how good the air quality is at home.
The longer the coronavirus pandemic lasts, the more data researchers around the world collect about the distribution, risk groups and also risk factors that favor serious progress. This includes not only things that people can influence themselves - such as whether they take a cigarette or not - but also environmental factors such as air quality. US researchers had looked at how air pollution affects the course of Covid-19 - with sobering results.
Particulate matter favors respiratory diseases - and severe Covid-19 courses
Francesca Dominici of the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Boston and her team found that U.S. citizens who had inhaled bad air for years were more likely to develop Covid-19 than people who lived in clean air . The risk of dying from Covid-19 also increased with the value of air pollution. For this observation, the researchers compared the air quality of over 3,000 counties in the United States with the Covid 19 death rate.
"We found that an increase of just one microgram of fine dust per cubic meter of air increases the Covid 19 death rate on average by 15 percent," the mirror quotes the researchers. Particulate matter pollution is an issue that has reached every German living room at the latest since the diesel scandal. Fine dust stands for the smallest particles in the air that are not visible to the naked eye and that do not sink to the ground immediately. Particulate matter is not only considered to trigger asthma * and other respiratory diseases, but is also said to favor cardiovascular diseases - all diseases that favor severe Covid-19 courses.
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"More regions infected with Sars-CoV-2 will be hospitalized in regions with poor air quality"
In Italy, too, scientists suspect a link between air pollution and serious illnesses *. Northern Italy in particular was particularly hard hit by the pandemic - a region that is struggling with high levels of air pollution. The knowledge magazine Quarks reported that the fine dust values in northern Italy are far above the European limit values . Fine dust with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) is also particularly highly concentrated in the air there. "Important man-made sources of fine dust are motor vehicles (cars, trucks), power and district heating plants, waste incineration plants, stoves and heating systems in residential buildings, bulk goods handling, animal husbandry and certain industrial processes. In metropolitan areas, road traffic is a particularly important source of fine dust not only from engines - primarily from diesel engines - into the air, but also from brake and tire abrasion as well as from the swirling of dust on the road surface, "informs the Federal Environment Agency. Agriculture is also a great source of fine dust.
Legally stipulated upper limits are intended to reduce the health risk due to excessive fine dust pollution. However, the World Health Organization (WHO) has determined that there is no fine dust concentration below which no harmful effects are expected . Researchers see an enormous risk from particulate matter not only with regard to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases: "In regions with poor air quality, more people infected with Sars-CoV-2 will come to the hospital and more will die," said Dominici of "New York Times ". Accordingly, important equipment such as ventilators would have to be distributed there more.
Would you like to know how fine dust is in front of your door? The Federal Environment Agency's air quality index provides information.
More sources: www.umweltbundesamt.de
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* Merkur.de belongs to the Germany-wide Ippen-Digital editors network.