The Association between Covid-19 and heavy metal pollution in Iraqi
cities from hierarchical prediction
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.