Exposure to air pollution and COVID-19 mortality in the United States

Xiao Wu; Rachel C. Nethery; Benjamin M. Sabath; Danielle Braun; Francesca Dominici

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.05.20054502 doi: medRxiv preprint author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. Figure 2 : Mortality Risk Ratios (MRR) and 95% confidence intervals. The MRR can be interpreted as percentage increase in the COVID-19 death rate associated with a 1 ߤ g/m 3 increase in long term average PM 2.5. The MRR from the main analysis is adjusted by seventeen potential confounders (population density, percent of the population >65, percent living in poverty, median household income, percent black, percent Hispanic, percent of the adult population with less than a high school education, median house value, percent of owneroccupied housing, population mean BMI, percent ever-smokers, summer/winter temperature/relative humidity, and number of hospital beds for each county, and number of COVID-19 tests performed for each state). In secondary analyses, we (a) omit number of hospital beds; (b) omit number of tested cases in each state; (c) omit smoking rate and BMI from BRFSS; (d) omit summer/winter temperature/relative humidity; (e) exclude data from New York state; (f) exclude data from counties with less than 10 confirmed cases. All COVID-19 death counts are cumulative counts up to and including April 04, 2020.