International Journal of Geo-Information Article Yearly and Daily Relationship Assessment between Air Pollution and Early-Stage COVID-19 Incidence: Evidence from 231 Countries and Regions Yuan Meng 1 , Man Sing Wong 1,2,*, Hanfa Xing 3,4, Mei-Po Kwan 5,6 and Rui Zhu 1 1 Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China;
[email protected] (Y.M.);
[email protected] (R.Z.) 2 Research Institute for Sustainable Urban Development, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China 3 School of Geography, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510000, China;
[email protected] 4 College of Geography and Environment, Shandong Normal University, Jinan 250100, China 5 Department of Geography and Resource Management, and Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China;
[email protected] 6 Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Utrecht University, 3584 CB Utrecht, The Netherlands * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +852-3400-8959 Abstract: The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused significantly changes in worldwide environmental and socioeconomics, especially in the early stage. Previous research has found that air pollution is potentially affected by these unprecedented changes and it affects COVID- Citation: Meng, Y.; Wong, M.S.; Xing, 19 infections. This study aims to explore the non-linear association between yearly and daily global H.; Kwan, M.-P.; Zhu, R. Yearly and air pollution and the confirmed cases of COVID-19. The concentrations of tropospheric air pollution Daily Relationship Assessment (CO, NO2,O3, and SO2) and the daily confirmed cases between 23 January 2020 and 31 May 2020 between Air Pollution and were collected at the global scale.