You may have seen the tweets, or even worse, you may have even shared the news; that there are dolphins and swans in Venice or there are elephants in China, all roaming around freely in this fresh and pure human-free world. We all want to believe in something good in this torrid time but it turns out those news and images were fake, well not totally fake, just not related to the current coronavirus lockdown throughout the world. Dolphins and swans were always in Venice and the photo of elephants is an old one.
So the question arises is if it’s the same old earth or is it just a little bit better? To cut through the noise and uncover the real truth, I decided to go through the data. Air Quality Index(AQI) is a pretty robust metric which reflects the air pollution levels and hence a very good way to understand the impact of the lockdown, at least on our lower atmosphere. You can see the variations of pollutant levels over the world here at CovidExplore.com.
I know, right? You can see the drastic differences between the end of January (week 5) and right now. Specifically, the NO2 levels have taken a huge hit since there are practically no cars on the street and very few industries operating. The most differences will be seen for Italy, Spain, Iran where the most stringent lockdowns are in place to tackle the widespread of the virus.
Now let’s look at the data and inferences over various places.
Europe
It will be more apparent once we take a deeper look at the pollutant levels of 3 countries in Europe: Italy, Spain and France, who went into lockdown the earliest.
So the effects of fewer cars and industrial emissions are very clear, reaching all-time low NO2 levels in all 3 countries in question. However, the PM2.5 levels are largely uncorrelated with the lockdowns. It will take 2–3 weeks more to fully assess how much is it affected by human absence.
CNN compared the NO2 levels between March 19 and March 2020 here. There is no doubt on how a 1–2 weeks of doing nothing can heal our atmosphere.
Here is a video on emissions over Europe processed by the Sentinel-5P satellite of the European Space Agency.
United States
Trump’s policy on the COVID-19 situation has been inconsistent. Without any nationwide lockdown, states have taken their own precautionary steps. California, New York has been among the most affected states. California took one of the earliest measures of stay-at-home orders across the state.
Los Angeles recorded one of the very earliest cases in the USA and hence measures like work-from-home restricted travel started at the ground level well before the authorities stepped in. The results are quite visible. You can check out the drastic difference between the NO2 levels over California and other US cities here.
Asia
But the most important of it all is perhaps Wuhan, where it all started. China also happens to be one of the most polluted nations in the world in terms of air pollution. Wuhan and other cities of the Hubei province were put under complete lockdown by the Chinese government on 23rd January. It is the city giving us the longest perspective of a lockdown among all our samples.
Very apparent, isn’t it? If you want to see an instant effect of a lockdown, the best case will be India. India went into complete lockdown from March 25 after having an experimental lockdown on March 22.
In fact, people in New Delhi have been seeing such low AQI levels in a long long time.
No amount of improvement in our climate can justify or make up for the loss of lives, suffering and pain that the people of our world are going through. It’s a folly to even think about it. But, what we can do is perhaps learn from it. The COVID crisis has been led to this stage because our world leaders were busy denying it’s effects just like they deny the various aspects of climate change. The next time, the crisis may be the climate one. So for that, we should be ready. That may not even have any chink in its armor.
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