JDS Journal of Data Science 1683-86021680-743X1680-743X School of Statistics, Renmin University of China JDS1010 10.6339/21-JDS1010 Data Science in Action Investigating the Relationship Between Air Quality and COVID-19 Transmission✩ https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4034-2975 AlbrechtLaura1† https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5011-882X CzarneckiPaulinapc2943@columbia.edu2∗† https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8798-584X SakelarisBennet3† Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO, USA Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York City, NY, USA Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

Version information: This is an updated version from the one released in April 2021. The update corrected the unit of PM 2.5 to AQI in Figures 3–4 and a few places involving it in the text.

Corresponding author. Email: pc2943@columbia.edu.

All authors contributed equally to this work.

 20212332021 193485497 Supplementary Material

The data and R code used to generate these results, as well as figures for individual cities in the validation process, are included in the supplementary files. A README is provided to describe the data available, how to generate each figure presented in the paper, and where important variables should be found in the code.

291220202622021 2021 The Author(s). Published by the School of Statistics and the Center for Applied Statistics, Renmin University of China.2021 Open access article under the CC BY license.

It is hypothesized that short-term exposure to air pollution may influence the transmission of aerosolized pathogens such as COVID-19. We used data from 23 provinces in Italy to build a generalized additive model to investigate the association between the effective reproductive number of the disease and air quality while controlling for ambient environmental variables and changes in human mobility. The model finds that there is a positive, nonlinear relationship between the density of particulate matter in the air and COVID-19 transmission, which is in alignment with similar studies on other respiratory illnesses.

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