Assessment of tropospheric nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels on the COVID-19 pandemic in Morocco

Abstract

After being discovered in Wuhan, China towards the end of December, the novel infectious disease with human-to-human transmission (COVID-19) spread around the world and became a pandemic. Globally, there have been over 4 million 600,000 COVID-19 cases reported, and over 300,000 patients have passed away. Many of the pre-existing diseases that are impacted by long-term exposure to air pollution are also those that raise the risk of infection and mortality in individuals with COVID-19. Under the locking conditions, the current study investigates this correlation at the national Moroccan level. TROPOMI data from the Sentinel-5P satellite is utilized to map the distribution of NO2 in the troposphere. According to the findings, three administrative regions with the highest tropospheric NO2 concentrations harbored 60% of the COVID-19 infected cases. When viewed within the global context, these findings suggest that prolonged exposure to this contaminant may play a role in the infection, death, and dissemination of the COVID-19 virus.