Air Pollution Exposure and Covid-19 in Dutch Municipalities
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Air Pollution Exposure and Covid‑19 in Dutch Municipalities Matthew A. Cole1 · Ceren Ozgen1,2 · Eric Strobl1,3 Accepted: 14 July 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In light of the existing preliminary evidence of a link between Covid-19 and poor air quality, which is largely based upon correlations, we estimate the relationship between long term air pollution exposure and Covid-19 in 355 municipalities in the Netherlands. Using detailed data we find compelling evidence of a positive relationship between air pollution, and particularly PM2.5 concentrations, and Covid-19 cases, hospital admissions and deaths. This relationship persists even after controlling for a wide range of explanatory variables. Our results indicate that, other things being equal, a municipality with 1 μg/m3 more PM2.5 concentrations will have 9.4 more Covid-19 cases, 3.0 more hospital admissions, and 2.3 more deaths. This relationship between Covid-19 and air pollution withstands a number of sensitivity and robustness exercises including instrumenting pollution to mitigate potential endogeneity in the measurement of pollution and modelling spatial spillovers using spatial econometric techniques. Keywords Covid-19 · Air pollution · Netherlands · Spatial spillovers JEL Classification I21 · I23 · Q53
We would like to thank Guus Velders and Hans Koster for the provision of RIVM air pollution data and commuting time data, respectively. We would also like to thank Noell Alting for additional research advice. * Matthew A. Cole [email protected] 1
Department of Economics, University of Birmingham, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
2
IZA, Bonn, Germany
3
University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
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1 Introduction The Covid-19 pandemic is causing significant social and economic impacts across large parts of the world. At the time of writing the number of Covid-19 cases worldwide has reached 7.2 million, while the death toll has exceeded 400,000.1 Governments and health care systems are facing the immense challenge of trying to control the spread of the virus and to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed as millions of individuals remain subject to lockdown and face significant economic uncertainty. In order to respond to these unprecedented challenges it is important for policy makers and health care professionals to understand which groups of individuals suffer the highest morbidity and mortality risks from Covid-19 and which factors may exacerbate these risks. A contributory factor that has been tentatively explored in several recent academic studies is poor air quality. While some such studies have identified the significant improvements in air quality that have resulted from Covid-19 lockdowns (Cicala et al. 2020; Cole et al. 2020), others have pointed to a correlation between Covid-19 hotspots and areas with high levels of pollution concentrations (Travaglio et al. 2020; Conticini et al. 2020). It is well known that long term exposure to pollutants such as nitrogen dioxide ( NO2 ), sulphur dioxide ( SO2 ),
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