Si Ting's Blog

In the article “What We Do and Don’t Know about the Links between Air Pollution and Coronavirus”, Lewis reported in The Conversation (13 May 2020) about the link between air pollution and the virus. Air pollution has led to aggravation of existing health conditions such as “strokes, heart disease, respiratory illness and more”, which has also led to the increase of COVID-19 deaths. Lewis also mentioned that air pollution in rich countries is “usually a population-centred problem” and that the virus has spread quickly from Wuhan to major cities around the world. Examples of cities like New York and London have “extensive global travel connections and their population densities” creates higher risk of “person-to-person contagion rates”. In addition, people living in urban areas are susceptible to the virus as well. Factors such as usage of mass transit systems and higher numbers of racial minorities also increase the occurrence of chronic health problems. During these difficult times as ...

  In the article "What We Do and Don’t Know about the Links between Air Pollution and Coronavirus",  Lewis, reported in The Conversion (13 May 2020) that connecting air pollution and coronavirus is superficial. He states that correlating the two “have often failed to take other geographically-connected factors into account”. He says that air pollution in rich countries is “usually a population-centred problem”, this close link between cities and air pollution makes it hard to identify how pollution affects the mortality of COVID-19. He then focuses on urban areas, stating that they face similar situations through the regular use of the mass transit system. Air pollution data is one of the only legitimate data that is easily accessible, leading to one having the misconception that air pollution has a proportionate effect on COVID-19 while referring to the data. The writer believes that more datasets will appear in the future to allow one to study the connections between air po...