Effects of air pollution indicators and meteorological parameters on the outbreak of COVID-19

The COVID-19 stems from SARS-CoV-2, which was first detected in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, causing almost 149 million confirmed cases and 3 million confirmed deaths worldwide in December 2019 – April 2021. COVID-19 was declared as a global pandemic by World Health Organization due to the rapid spread of the cases and mortality rate on March 11th, 2020. To prevent the transmission of this pandemic, various investigations have been focused on which factors trigger to expand the outbreak of COVID-19. Correspondingly, the previous studies emphasized a substantially strong association between air pollution and public health, particularly related to respiratory diseases based on viral infections. In this context, the recent publications revealed that both air pollutants, including nitrogen oxide, sulphur oxide, ozone, carbon monoxide, atmospheric particulate matters (PM2.5 and PM10) and meteorological indicators, such as temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed, rainfall, have a considerably significant impact on the transmission of the outbreak. This study summarizes the outcomes of the investigations presenting the effects of air quality parameters and climatological variables on the logarithmic increase in the number of infected people to shed light on the future studies considering especially limitations in the present works.