Covid-19 infection in Italy and air pollution. Is there a correlation?
It seems there’s a relationship between air pollution and Coronavirus infection in Italy
In the past few days, I’ve read some articles saying that there’s some correlation between how many times the PM10 levels of the air of a city goes over the safety threshold and Coronavirus infection spread in that city. I’ve also read that there’s a suspect that Coronavirus is able to stick itself to PM10 particles, which can float on air for many days, traveling a lot. That would be very bad for those people living in highly polluted cities because they could be reached by the virus even staying at home.
These articles have inspired me a quantitative analysis of whether there is a correlation between air pollution and infection rate.
For this analysis, I’ll focus only on Italian provinces, which are administrative sets of cities.
For each city in Italy, I’ll get air pollution data as the mean concentration of PM10 in a certain period. The concentration is then averaged over all the cities of a province. Then I’ll calculate a measure of virus infection rate that describes the speed of the infection in that province.
