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The Association between Covid-19 and heavy metal pollution in Iraqi cities from hierarchical prediction
  • Aram Mohammed Raheem
Aram Mohammed Raheem
University of Kirkuk

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Abstract

An assessment was carried out of the relationship between the Corona Virus (covid-19) and the spread across Iraq of various heavy metal contaminations. At the onset, all the confirmed, recovered and death cases of covid-19 virus in Iraq up to the date of May, 2nd, 2020 were collected and compared with the top three infected countries in the world (USA, Spain and Italy). On the other hand, numerous heavy metal contaminations in different Iraqi cities have been summarized and associated with allowable upper and lower worldwide standard limits. In addition, the study introduced a hierarchical predictive approach for the relationship between confirmed and death cases of covid-19 viruses with heavy metal contamination in various Iraqi cities. It was concluded that all the studied Iraqi cities have heavy metal contamination for different chemical elements exceeding the allowable standard limits. In addition, it was shown that the extreme contents of Copper (Cu), Nickel (Ni), Lead (Pb), and Zinc (Zn) are concentrated in Al-Qadisiyah, Al-Sulaimaniyah, Erbil and Baghdad cities with limits of 160 µg / g, 240.9 µg / g, 378 µg / g and 1080 µg / g respectively. Based on the hierarchical prediction approach, a linear positive relationship between both confirmed and death covid-19 cases with different heavy metal contamination was obtained with a maximum coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.97.