Investigating Significance of Aerosols in Determining Coronavirus Fatality Rate Among Three European Countries

The coronavirus pandemic has gripped the scientific community in the search for vaccines & cure to environmental factors that increase its potency using statistics and association analysis. A recent study explored the possible association between coronavirus fatality and high nitrogen dioxide exposure in four European countries - France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Meanwhile, another study showed the importance of nitrogen dioxide along with population density in determining the coronavirus pandemic rate in England. In this follow-up study Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) levels were introduced in conjunction with other variables like nitrogen dioxide and population density for further analysis in fifty-four administrative regions of Germany, Italy and Spain. The AOD levels were extracted from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Terra and Aqua satellites while the nitrogen dioxide concentrations were extracted from Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite. Regression models, as well as multiple statistical tests were used to evaluate the predictivity and significance of each variable to the fatality rate. Some of the results clearly pointed towards AOD being a significant factor in determining the coronavirus fatality rate, especially when AOD values were used from the same period as the coronavirus fatalities. These AOD values taken from the same period also had a higher concentration than the values extracted from a period before the coronavirus fatalities were at their peak. Because the higher AOD values aided in the regression models performing better it indicated AOD could be a significant factor in determining coronavirus fatality rate in regions with high values of AOD, like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. At the same time, some other results were not completely conclusive which could be attributed to data quality and the absence of other important factors that determine the coronavirus fatality rate. After all, this is an ongoing and unsolved pandemic and thus there is much more to be known about the virus and its factors which is not known at this moment.