Effects of COVID-19 lockdown on global air quality and health.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic has put much of the world into lockdown, as one unintended upside to this response, the air quality has been widely reported to have improved worldwide. Existing studies examine the environmental effect of lockdowns at a city- or country-level, few examines it from a global perspective. Using a novel COVID-19 government response tracker dataset, combining the daily air pollution data and weather data across 597 major cities worldwide between January 1, 2020, and July 5, 2020, this study quantifies the causal impacts of 8 types of lockdown measures on changes of a range of individual pollutants based on a difference-in-differences design. The results show that the NO₂ air quality index value falls more precipitously (23-37%) relative to the pre-lockdown peri

SUBMITTER: Liu F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7525347 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature