Fig 1.
Air Quality level during the West Coast wildfire season in 2020.
(a) Air Quality Index extracted for PM2.5 particle pollution for all counties in Oregon (OR), Washington (WA), and California (CA). Horizontal line at 150 indicates the Air Quality Index (AQI) threshold for health concerns; (b) The map highlights in dark red the most affected counties in Oregon (OR) and Washington (WA) that were included in our study. The orange counties represent unaffected areas used as a baseline. Both affected and unaffected counties are part of the Northern Indoor Seasonality Cluster (in dark grey). Base layer: https://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/GENZ2020/shp/cb_2020_us_county_20m.zip.
Table 1.
Regression Discontinuity Coefficients by Affected U.S. County with 90% Confidence Intervals.
Fig 2.
Shift in human behaviors due to wildfire smoke.
The figure shows the indoor activity seasonality index between July 1, 2020, and November, 01, 2020 in the 10 selected affected counties: Multnomah County (Portland City), Washington County, Clackamas County, Lane County, Marion County in Oregon state, and King County (Seattle city), Spokane County, Yakima County, Clark County, Thurston County in Washington state. In each subplot, we also show in yellow the median and 95% CI of the indoor activity seasonality index for the unaffected counties that we used as a baseline. The violet curves represent the AQI of the affected counties during the studied period.
Fig 3.
The cascade impact of the shift in human behavior on airborne diseases.
A) Relative variation in peak incidence between Washington County, OR, and unaffected counties for different generation times [20] with R0 = 1.3. The boxplot median represents the median relative peak incidence across unaffected counties, and the blue vertical lines denote the average generation times for various airborne respiratory diseases. B) Relative variation in peak incidence for the selected 10 affected counties compared to the unaffected ones for three different reproduction ratios R0 = 1.3 (flu-like w/ interventions), R0 = 1.5 (flu-like). and, R0 = 3.0 (COVID-19-like). C) Relative variation in peak incidence when masking interventions are put in place, with R0 = 1.3.