Response to the commentary by Pisoni E. and Van Dingenen R. on 'Assessing nitrogen dioxide (NO_2) levels as a contributing factor to coronavirus (COVID-19) fatality'

摘要

Dear Editor I wish to thank Dr. Enrico Pisoni and Dr. Rita Van Dingenen for their effort to write comments on my recent paper "Assessing nitrogen dioxide (NO_2) levels as a contributing factor to coronavirus (COVID-19) fatality" (Ogen, 2020a). I will answer all their comments as they appear in the letter to the editor. Answer to comment 1: I agree with the comment about the limitation of satellite data. This data provides a spatial assessment of the NO_2 concentration of a large area. However, even the ground-level NO_2 measurement has limitation because it is valid only to the place of measurement and it is not possible to conclude about a certain area using this data. Therefore, the satellite, although it has its own limitations, provides continuous spatial NO_2 data even in remote regions where no in-situ device is found. I should add that the absolute value itself is not important for the frame of my article but the relative value. The main conclusion of my research was that the high fatalities due to COVID-19 were observed in regions with high NO2 concentrations provided by the Sentinel 5.