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