How Transportation Restriction Shapes the Relationship Between Ambient Nitrogen Dioxide and COVID-19 Transmissibility: An Exploratory Analysis
How Transportation Restriction Shapes the Relationship Between Ambient Nitrogen Dioxide and COVID-19 Transmissibility: An Exploratory Analysis
Blog Article
Background: Several recent studies reported a positive (statistical) association between ambient nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and COVID-19 transmissibility.However, considering the intensive transportation restriction due to lockdown measures that would lead to declines in both ambient NO2 concentration and COVID-19 spread, the crude or insufficiently adjusted associations between NO2 and COVID-19 transmissibility might be confounded.This study aimed to investigate whether transportation restriction confounded, mediated, or modified the dragon ball lg disney association between ambient NO2 and COVID-19 transmissibility.
Methods: The time-varying reproduction number (Rt) was calculated to quantify the instantaneous COVID-19 transmissibility in 31 Chinese cities from January 1, 2020, to February 29, 2020.For each city, we evaluated the relationships between ambient NO2, transportation restriction, and COVID-19 transmission under three scenarios, including simple linear regression, mediation analysis, and adjusting transportation restriction as a confounder.The statistical significance (p-value < 0.
05) of the three scenarios in 31 cities was summarized.Results: We repeated the crude correlational analysis, and also found the significantly positive association between NO2 and COVID-19 transmissibility.We found that little evidence supported NO2 as a mediator between transportation restriction and COVID-19 transmissibility.
The association between NO2 and COVID-19 transmissibility appears less likely after adjusting the effects of transportation restriction.Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the crude association between NO2 and COVID-19 transmissibility is likely confounded by the transportation restriction in the early COVID-19 outbreak.After adjusting the confounders, the association between NO2 and COVID-19 transmissibility here appears unlikely.
Further studies are warranted to validate the findings in other regions.