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Review
. 2021 Jun:21:101061.
doi: 10.1016/j.jth.2021.101061. Epub 2021 Mar 26.

Effect of COVID-19 on air quality and pollution in different countries

Noor Albayati  1 , Basma Waisi  2 , Mustafa Al-Furaiji  3 , Mohammed Kadhom  4 , Hayder Alalwan  5
Affiliations
Review

Effect of COVID-19 on air quality and pollution in different countries

Noor Albayati et al. J Transp Health. 2021 Jun.

Abstract

Introduction: COVID-19 is a pandemic that affected humans' lives and activities through the year 2020 in a way that was not witnessed in recent years. Many governments declared a complete lockdown as a try to stop the transmission of the disease. This lockdown resulted in a good recovery in environmental health, where air pollutants levels dramatically decreased.

Theory: There are two relations between air pollution and COVID-19, one is before the disease spread, and the other is after. Before the disease spread, many areas had high levels of contaminants in the air due to industrial activities, transportation, and human density. These areas had the highest infection rates and death cases. This could be attributed to two reasons, the aerosol could help to spread the virus at a higher rate, and air pollutants could negatively affect peoples' lungs, which assisted the virus in attacking the patients brutally.

Results: After the disease spread, the lockdown that was applied in the major industrial countries led to a decrease in the pollutants levels and an increase in the ozone level in the air. This lockdown improved the air quality worldwide to a level that all political conferences and agreements could not reach. In this review, we are showing the impact of COVID-19 on air pollutants in different countries.

Summary: This paper provides information about pollutants' influence on human and environmental health that other researchers obtained in different areas of the globe before and after the pandemic. This could give ideas about the impact of humans on the environment and the possible ways of recovering the environment's health.

Keywords: Air pollution; COVID-19; Lockdown; Nitrogen dioxide; Pandemic; Particle matter.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no known conflict of interest for this work.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
(a) PM2.5 concentration, (b) PM10 concentration, (c) NOx concentration, (d) CO concentration during COVID-19 lockdown period in Delhi (Kotnala et al., 2020).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
The concentration of the aerosol for the period between March 31st, 2016, and April 5th, 2020 in India (Gautam, 2020b).
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Variation in the concentration of NO2 in China during the COVID-19 lockdowns (Gautam, 2020a).
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Changes in nitrogen dioxide emission levels in China (Wang and Su, 2020).
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
The reduction in NO2 concentration in France, Italy, and Spain during the lockdown (Gautam, 2020a).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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