Journal
SCIENCE ADVANCES
Volume 7, Issue 33, Pages -Publisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abi8789
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Funding
- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) [83587201-0]
- National Institutes of Health [R01ES026217, R01MD012769, R01ES028033, 1R01AG060232-01A1, 1R01ES030616, 1R01AG066793-01R01, 1R01ES029950, 5T32ES007142]
- National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences [P30ES000002]
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- Harvard University Climate Change Solutions Fund
- 2020 Star Friedman Challenge for Promising Scientific Research
- Fernholz Innovation Fund for Data Science to the Data Science Initiative at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
- [1RF1AG071024-01]
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In 2020, wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic occurred simultaneously in the western United States. Studies have shown that wildfires exacerbated the impact of PM2.5 on COVID-19 cases and deaths, but with significant heterogeneity across counties.
The year 2020 brought unimaginable challenges in public health, with the confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic and wildfires across the western United States. Wildfires produce high levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5). Recent studies reported that short-term exposure to PM2.5 is associated with increased risk of COVID-19 cases and deaths. We acquired and linked publicly available daily data on PM2.5, the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths, and other confounders for 92 western U.S. counties that were affected by the 2020 wildfires. We estimated the association between short-term exposure to PM2.5 during the wildfires and the epidemiological dynamics of COVID-19 cases and deaths. We adjusted for several time-varying confounding factors (e.g., weather, seasonality, long-term trends, mobility, and population size). We found strong evidence that wildfires amplified the effect of short-term exposure to PM2.5 on COVID-19 cases and deaths, although with substantial heterogeneity across counties.
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