DatAC: A visual analytics platform to explore climate and air quality indicators associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused an unprecedented global health crisis, with several countries imposing lockdowns to control the coronavirus spread. Important research efforts are focused on evaluating the association of environmental factors with the survival and spread of the virus and different works have been published, with contradictory results in some cases. Data with spatial and temporal information is a key factor to get reliable results and, although there are some data repositories for monitoring the disease both globally and locally, an application that integrates and aggregates data from meteorological and air quality variables with COVID-19 information has not been described so far to the best of our knowledge. Here, we present DatAC (Data Against COVID-19), a data fusion project with an interactive web frontend that integrates COVID-19 and environmental data in Spain. DatAC is provided with powerful data analysis and statistical capabilities that allow users to explore and analyze individual trends and associations among the provided data. Using the application, we have evaluated the impact of the Spanish lockdown on the air quality, observing that NO 2 , CO, PM 2.5 , PM 10 and SO 2 levels decreased drastically in the entire territory, while O 3 levels increased. We observed similar trends in urban and rural areas, although the impact has been more important in the former. Moreover, the application allowed us to analyze correlations among climate factors, such as ambient temperature, and the incidence of COVID-19 in Spain. Our results indicate that temperature is not the driving factor and without effective control actions, outbreaks will appear and warm weather will not substantially limit the growth of the pandemic. DatAC is available at https://covid19.genyo.es .

Occupancy-aided ventilation for both airborne infection risk control and work productivity

“…Reducing occupancy has been recommended for airborne infection risk control [ 3 , 16 ]. Under some urgent scenarios, even the lockdown of a whole city is adopted [ 30 ]. Reducing occupancy is particularly useful when other practical measures cannot effectively control airborne infection risk, such as airborne infection risk control of COVID-19 when the schools, office, etc .…”

The global impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns on urban air pollution

“…Brazil: (Dantas et al, 2020;Krecl et al, 2020;Nakada and Urban, 2020;Siciliano et al, 2020a) Other: (Mendez-Espinosa et al, 2020;Pacheco et al, 2020;Zalakeviciute et al, 2020;Zambrano-Monserrate and Ruano, 2020) Europe Multiple countries: (Baldasano, 2020;Collivignarelli et al, 2020;Filippini et al, 2020;Gautam, 2020a;Giani et al, 2020;Gualtieri et al, 2020;Higham et al, 2020;Ljubenkov et al, 2020;Sicard et al, 2020;Tobías et al, 2020;Martorell-Marugán et al, 2021) Oceania Australia: (Fu et al, 2020) New Zealand: (Patel et al, 2020) Africa Morocco: (Ass et al, 2020;Otmani et al, 2020) This includes the "discussed but not corrected" and "not discussed or corrected" categories in Figure 2. (Zheng et al, 2020), and Tianjin (Dai et al, 2020), China.…”

“…, 2020),(Zhang et al, 2020d), United Kingdom:(Higham et al, 2020),(Fu et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2020d), Russia:(Fu et al, 2020), Italy:(Fu et al, 2020), France:(Fu et al, 2020),(Zhang et al, 2020d), Spain:(Fu et al, 2020),(Martorell-Marugán et al, 2021),(Zhang et al, 2020d), and Germany:(Zhang et alet al, 2020a;Chen et al, 2020d;Jia et al, 2020b;Liu et al, 2020c;Qiu et al, 2020;Yuan et al, 2021), India:(Chatterjee et al, 2020;Panda et al, 2020), Italy:(Collivignarelli et al, 2020), United Kingdom: (Ropkins and Tate, 2020), Canada: (Adams, 2020), United States:(Xiang et al, 2020), and Brazil:(Nakada and Urban, 2020;Siciliano et al, 2020b) AOD India:(Gautam, 2020b;Ranjan et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2020d), China(Diamond and Wood, 2020;Ghahremanloo et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2020d;Shen et al, 2021), South Korea, and Japan(Ghahremanloo et al, 2020), North America, and Europe(Zhang et al, 2020d) NMVOCs China:(Ghahremanloo et al, 2020;Jia et al, 2020b;Qiu et al, 2020), South Korea:(Ghahremanloo et al, 2020), Japan:(Ghahremanloo et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2020b), India:(Beig et al, 20...…”

How (Un)sustainable Environments Are Related to the Diffusion of COVID-19: The Relation between Coronavirus Disease 2019, Air Pollution, Wind Resource and Energy

“…In general, several studies present the hypothesis that atmospheric pollution associated with certain climatological factors (such as, high humidity and low wind speed) may support a longer permanence of viral particles in the air, fostering the rapid spread of COVID-19 within polluted regions [5,11,12,14,15]. In this context, Martorell-Marugán et al [16] suggest new tools for supporting increased data analysis and statistical capabilities that allow users to explore trends and associations between critical environmental data and the spread of COVID-19 in society. In particular, Megahed and Ghoneim [17] argue that the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the built environment because of the fear of infection; as a result, appropriate architecture and urbanism can reduce potential risks or stop the spread of infectious diseases by designing a healthy and sustainable built environment.…”