COVID-19 – Bennet Sakelaris

Collaborators


 Paulina Czarnecki, PhD student at Columbia University, Department of Applied Physics & Applied Mathematics

Laura Albrecht, PhD student at Colorado School of Mines, Department of Applied Mathematics & Statistics

Advisors

Mary Silber, University of Chicago, Department of Statistics Mary Lou Zeeman, Bowdoin University, Department of Mathematics Dick McGehee, University of Minnesota, Department of Mathematics

Funding & Acknowledgements

This research was part of a workshop at the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM), and affiliated with the Mathematics and Climate Research Network with funding from AIM and the NSF.

Further Info

Here is a link to a 15 minute presentation that I gave at the Data Science Conference on COVID-19. Here is a link to our publication in the Journal of Data Science. (Here is the version on arXiv)

Investigating the Relationship Between Short-Term Exposure to Air Pollution and COVID-19 Transmission in Italy

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It is hypothesized that short-term exposure to the air pollution may influence the transmission of aerosolized pathogens such as COVID-19.In order to study this, 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.