Air pollution has significantly decreased over China amid the economic slowdown caused by the Covid-19 outbreak, signaling unanticipated implications for human health.
“Given the huge amount of evidence that breathing dirty air contributes heavily to premature mortality, a natural — if admittedly strange — question is whether the lives saved from this reduction in pollution caused by economic disruption from Covid-19 exceeds the death toll from the virus itself,” Stanford University environmental resource economist Marshall Burke wrote in the global food, environment and economic dynamics blog, G-FEED.
“Even under very conservative assumptions, I think the answer is a clear ‘yes,’” he added. Following China’s actions to control the spread of the virus via mandatory quarantine, NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) pollution monitoring satellites detected a reduction of nitrogen dioxide (NO2)—a gas emitted when fossil fuels such as oil, gas or coal are burned—over China.
Other analyses have reported a reduction of ground-based concentrations of fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, also a harmful pollutant.
Using this data, as well as estimates of the economic disruption caused by Covid-19, Burke ran some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the potential number of lives that could be saved by this drop in air pollution. The two-month pollution drop, Burke estimates, has saved the lives of 4,000 children under the age of 5 and 73,000 adults over the age of 70 in China — significantly more than the global death toll from the Covid-19 pandemic at the time of calculation.
(Eco-Business)
0 comments: