New Study Finds Pollen Could Increase Coronavirus Infection Susceptibility
It’s beginning to feel like spring, and with warmer weather also comes seasonal allergies, which could increase one’s susceptibility to a COVID-19 infection, suggests the findings of a new study.
In the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Helmholtz Zentrum München noted that co-exposure to airborne pollen enhances one’s susceptibility to respiratory viral infections in general, “regardless of the allergy status.”
“We hypothesized this could be also true for SARS-CoV-2 infections,” they wrote.
For the study, researchers “tested for relationships between SARS-CoV-2 infection rates and pollen concentrations,” cross-referencing this with humidity, temperature, population density, and lockdown effects from 130 sites in 31 countries and across five continents, they said.
