Two mechanisms for accelerated diffusion of COVID-19 outbreaks in regions with high intensity of population and polluting industrialization: the air pollution-to-human and human-to-human transmission dynamics

Mario Coccia

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.06.20055657 doi: medRxiv preprint 24 | P a g e Coccia M. (2020) Two mechanisms for accelerated diffusion of COVID-19 outbreaks in regions with high intensity of population and polluting industrialization: the air pollution-to-human and human-to-human transmission dynamics CocciaLab Working Paper 2020 -No. 48B/2020 Advanced countries, such as in Europe, have more and more smog because of an unexpected temperature inversion, which trap emissions from the city's coal-burning heating stoves and diesel powered buses near ground-level in winter. The ambient pollution mixes with moisture in the air to form a thick, foul-smelling fog that affect the health of people in the city Bell et al., 2004) . The exposure to pollutants, such as airborne particulate matter and ozone, generates respiratory and cardiovascular diseases with increases in mortality and hospital admissions (cf., Langrish and Mills, 2014) . Wei et al. (2020) analyze the effect of heavy aerosol pollution in northern Chinacharacterized by long-duration, high PM2.5 concentrations and wide geographical coverage that impacts on environmental ecology, climate change and public health (cf., Liu et al., 2017 Liu et al., , 2018 Jin et al., 2017) . The biological components of air pollutants and bio aerosols also include bacteria, viruses, pollens, fungi, and animal/plant fragments (Després et al., 2012; Fröhlich-Nowoisky et al., 2016; Smets et al., 2016) . Studies show that during heavy aerosol pollution in Beijing (China), 50%-70% of bacterial aerosols are in sub micrometer particles, 0.56-1 mm cf., Zhang et al., 2016) . As bacteria size typically ranges from 0.5 to 2.0 mm (Després et al., 2012) , they can form clumps or attach to particles and transport regionally between terrestrial, aquatic, atmospheric and artificial ecosystems (Smets et al., 2016) . Moreover, because of regional bio aerosol transportation, harmful microbial components, bacterial aerosols have dangerous implications on human health and also plantation (cf., Van Leuken et al., 2016) . Harmful bio aerosol componentsincluding pathogens, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and endotoxinscan cause severe respiratory and cardiovascular diseases in society (Charmi et al., 2018) . In fact, the concentration of microbes, pathogens and toxic components significantly increases during polluted days, compared to no polluted days . In addition, airborne bacterial community structure and concentration varies with pollutant concentration, which may be related to bacterial sources and multiplication in the air . Studies also indicate that microbial community composition, concentration, and bioactivity are significantly affected by particle concentration . To put it differently, the atmospheric particulate matter harbors more microbes during polluted days than sunny or clean days (Wei et al., 2016) . These studies can explain one of the . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.