Coronavirus: Air pollution plummets as people work from home

Air pollution has significantly decreased in urban areas over the last ten days, head of the air quality and strategic planning section Chrysanthos Savvides confirmed on Monday.

A look at air quality data available shows the air has rarely been so clean, said Savvides, confirming this was because of a sharp decrease in traffic with so many people working from home.

“Vehicles are one of the major sources of air pollution in the urban areas,” he said.

“During the rush hours from 7am to 9am the pollutant concentrations in some situations have fallen up to four times below ‘normal’ levels.”

Explaining the graphs his section prepared, he said pollutant concentrations have fallen in all areas in March.

The pollutants that decreased the most are nitrogen oxide (NOx), carbon monoxide (CO), particulate matter (PM10), and benzene.

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention benzene can cause bone marrow not to produce enough red blood cells, which can lead to anaemia. It can also damage the immune system by changing blood levels of antibodies and causing the loss of white blood cells.

Breathing CO can cause headache, dizziness, vomiting, and nausea. Exposure to moderate and high levels of CO over long periods of time has also been linked with increased risk of heart disease.

Exposure to nitrogen oxide can cause irritation of the respiratory system, eyes, and skin and aggravates respiratory diseases, particularly asthma.

The lack of pollutants and its benefits have been observed elsewhere.

Two months of pollution reduction “likely has saved the lives of 4,000 kids under five and 73,000 adults over 70 in China,” earth systems professor Marshall Burke wrote on G-Feed, a site run by a group of scientists researching the relationship between society and the environment.

He used data from US government sensors in four Chinese cities to measure levels of PM2.5, the tiny particulate matter considered the primary cause of death from air pollution.

 

 

Graph shows how levels of carbon monoxide have fallen

 

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