Angelico Mendy, MD, PhD, assistant professor of environmental and public health sciences, at the UC College of Medicine, looked at the health outcomes and backgrounds of 1,128 COVID-19 patients at UC Health, the UC-affiliated health care system in Greater Cincinnati.

Mendy led a team of researchers in an individual-level study which used a statistical model to evaluate the association between long-term exposure to particulate matter less or equal to 2.5 micrometers — it refers to a mixture of tiny particles and droplets in the air that are two-and-one half microns or less in width — and hospitalizations for COVID-19. Medical records allowed researchers to use patients’ zip codes for estimating their particulate exposure over a 10-year period.

“Particulate matter is very small, small enough to be inhaled deep into the lungs, they cross into the blood and also affect other organ systems,” says Mendy. “Air pollution as a result of emissions from automobiles, factories or other sources is a generator of particulate matter.”

“Our study didn’t find any correlation between severity of COVID-19 and particulate matter in general, but we found something for people who had asthma and COPD,” says Mendy. “People who have preexisting asthma and COPD, when they are exposed to higher levels of particulate matter, they are more likely to have severe COVID-19, severe enough to be hospitalized.”

Researchers found that a one-unit increase in particulate matter 2.5 was associated with a 60% higher chance of hospitalization for COVID-19 patients with pre-existing respiratory disease. For patients without respiratory disease, no association was observed.

The study’s findings were published online in the scholarly journal Respiratory Medicine.

It is the first study to look at an association between air pollution, COVID-19 and individual patients, says Mendy. A study co-author, Xiao Wu, PhD, in the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard University, led a study last year looking at air pollution and COVID-19 mortality in the United States.

“This study may have policy implications such as reducing particulate exposure,” says Mendy. “Many people want to have more clean energy and reduced emissions into the atmosphere.”

Mendy says the findings of his pilot study are preliminary and he hopes to use it to generate support for a larger more comprehensive study of patients. The UC Health patients in the study were diagnosed with COVID-19 between March 13, 2020 and July 5, 2020. The dataset was stripped of all Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) identifiers. The median age for patients was 46 and 96.6% were residents of Ohio with the remaining 3.4% coming from Kentucky, Indiana, New York, South Carolina, West Virginia and Iowa.

Other study co-authors from UC include Jason Keller, a researcher in the Department of Bioinformatics; Cecily Fassler, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Environmental and Public Health Sciences; Senu Apewokin, MD, an assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine; Tesfaye Mersha, an associate professor pediatrics; and Changchun Xie, PhD, and Susan Pinney, PhD, both professors in the Department of Environmental and Public Health Sciences.

Nearly 30,000 people with COVID-19 were hospitalized, after 551 new admissions were reported in the past 24 hours, the biggest one-day increase in a week, Xinhua reported.

The number of critically-ill patients who required intensive care increased by 92 to 5,433, exceeding the country’s original capacity of 5,100 resuscitation beds.

Deaths caused by the respiratory disease rose to 96,847, up by 197 in a single day compared with 185 on Sunday. The cumulative number of infections went over 4.8 million, with further 10,793 people tested positive within a day.

“We are already at 5,400 patients in intensive care and we know that in the coming weeks, whatever happens, the number of patients in intensive care will continue to increase automatically,” Health Minister Olivier Veran told TF1 television earlier in the day.

Veran warned that in France “the epidemic situation remains tense” and expected the third coronavirus wave would reach its peak “this week”.

France, which relies on faster vaccines rollout to contain the virus spread, would receive 12 million additional doses this month, giving the government’s vaccination plan a shot in the arm.

The objective of inoculating 10 million people by mid-April would be met and “even anticipated by few days”, the minister said.

Starting from mid-April people aged over 60 in France will be able to get vaccinated, from May 15 the vaccination will be open to people aged between 50 and 60 and from mid-June the age limit will be lifted.

Since the start of the vaccination campaign, over 9.35 million people, or 17.8 percent of the adult population, have received at least one shot and more than 3.14 million have got two injections, the Health Ministry said on Monday.

This weekend, France went into one-month confinement to cope with the third wave of the epidemic. People’s movement is limited to a radius of 10 kilometers from home and inter-cities travels are banned.

Schools are closed for three to four weeks and non-essential shops shut down. Catering businesses and culture venues, forced to suspend their activities since late October 2020, remained closed.