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. 2022 Apr:194:107340.
doi: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107340. Epub 2022 Jan 7.

Particulate matter and COVID-19 excess deaths: Decomposing long-term exposure and short-term effects

Leonardo Becchetti  1 , Gabriele Beccari  1 , Gianluigi Conzo  1 , Pierluigi Conzo  2 , Davide De Santis  3 , Francesco Salustri  4
Affiliations

Particulate matter and COVID-19 excess deaths: Decomposing long-term exposure and short-term effects

Leonardo Becchetti et al. Ecol Econ. 2022 Apr.

Abstract

We investigate the time-varying effect of particulate matter (PM) on COVID-19 deaths in Italian municipalities. We find that the lagged moving averages of PM2.5 and PM10 are significantly related to higher excess deceases during the first wave of the disease, after controlling, among other factors, for time-varying mobility, regional and municipality fixed effects, the nonlinear contagion trend, and lockdown effects. Our findings are confirmed after accounting for potential endogeneity, heterogeneous pandemic dynamics, and spatial correlation through pooled and fixed-effect instrumental variable estimates using municipal and provincial data. In addition, we decompose the overall PM effect and find that both pre-COVID long-term exposure and short-term variation during the pandemic matter. In terms of magnitude, we observe that a 1 μg/m3 increase in PM2.5 can lead to up to 20% more deaths in Italian municipalities, which is equivalent to a 5.9% increase in mortality rate.

Keywords: COVID-19; Copernicus; Excess deaths; Long-term exposure; Particulate matter; Short-term effect.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
A–C. Excess deaths, PM2.5 and PM10 in Italian municipalities. Note: Excess deaths is the daily difference of total deaths in 2020 and the 2015–19 average total deaths at municipality level (Source: Istat); PM2.5 is the 11-day (from t−10 to t) moving average of particulate matter with diameter < 2.5 μm (μg/m3); PM10 is the 11-day (from t−10 to t) moving average of particulate matter with diameter < 2.5 μm (μg/m3).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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