Air pollution poses an important environmental risk for health and it is one of the biggest problems that humanity has to deal with. Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is the compound to analyze, it belongs to the category of gaseous pollutants, which are produced due to combustion engines and other processes like burning fossil fuels in power stations (1). A research issued by the University of Colorado explains that there is a relationship between nitrogen dioxide and respiratory diseases (2). There are proofs that concentration of nitrogen dioxide exists near main traffic routes, therefore it is important considering its effects on people. These oxides react with other particles in the environment and merges to the material; in presence of volatile organic compounds and solar radiation, they react generating ozone (O3) which can also have adverse reactions on the respiratory system of people. According to the level of air pollution in different countries, ozone can produce a morbidity rate caused by infections in the respiratory tract.

In such circumstances, several researches can suppose that there is a correlation between atmospheric pollution and infections of this new illness.

To explain these empirical conclusions, epidemiologists point out atmospheric pollution can produce effects in the pandemic of COVID-19 in three ways: raising the propagation, raising the susceptibility and worsening the infection. (3)

According to this context and knowing the new coronavirus also affects the respiratory tract, there is the hypothesis that there exists a correlation between air pollution and the number of deaths produced by COVID-19. For this reason, we are going to analyse some of the most important cities in North America, such as CDMX and Jalisco in Mexico, New York and Washington in U.S.A. and, finally, Ontario and British Columbia in Canada. We are going to compare the levels of nitrogen dioxide in each one of these cities and the mortality rates for COVID-19, so that we will analyze if high levels of nitrogen dioxide in the air can be related to the high number of deaths for COVID-19.

To achieve this, we are going to use techniques of Machine Learning, due to its capacity to identify patterns among the data and therefore to make predictions. Using the outcomes obtained and interference of these new data clusters the team can conclude if the hypotheses posed were correct or not.

The Goddard Space Center was the tool to let us observe the concentration of Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) in different cities of the world. We started looking at the data and analyzing the possible ways to infer the problematic of pollution during this pandemic.

The baseline is the measurement of the predicted behavior that has already been made by machine learning and the median data that has been processed by NASA. We use the baseline median data and the median data to program and calculate the percent of change from baseline in MATLAB.