“About two-thirds of premature deaths are attributable to human-made air pollution, mainly from fossil fuel use; this goes up to 80 per cent in high-income countries,” Thomas Münzel, of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Department of Cardiology of the University Medical Centre in Mainz, Germany, said in a statement. Images released by NASA show a dramatic reduction of NO2 during the quarantines in China (Feb. 10-25) compared to before the quarantines (Jan. 1-20). The NO2 pollution reduction appeared first near the city of Wuhan, where the virus is believed to have originated and a strict quarantine was put in place beginning on Jan. 23. Though it is typical to see some decrease in air pollution as factories and businesses close during the Lunar New Year celebrations in China (which this year ran from the end of January into early February), researchers say they believe this is more than a holiday effect. The rates have not rebounded, as they would in a typical year. “This is the first time I have seen such a dramatic drop-off over such a wide area for a specific event,” said Fei Liu, an air quality researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. While the economic disruption caused by Covid-19 might have reduced air pollution, Burke said we should not think of this as a “silver lining” or a “benefit” of the pandemic. The pandemic is harmful to health directly and the broader disruption it is causing — lost incomes, inability to receive care for non-Covid-19 illnesses and injuries, etc. — could have far-reaching implications. “None of my calculations support any idea that pandemics are good for health,” Burke writes. “The effects I calculate just represent health benefits from the air pollution changes wrought by the economic disruption, and do not account for the many other short or long-term negative consequences of this disruption on health or other outcomes; these harms likely vastly exceed any health benefits from reduced air pollution.” The pandemic is forcing many to experiment with different ways of doing things. Substituting remote and online work for commuting and travel, for example, reduces fossil fuel emissions. Some of these changes could have meaningful environmental benefits that could, in turn, benefit human health. “If there is any environmental lesson, it’s perhaps the useful reminder of the often-hidden health consequences of the status quo … i.e. the substantial costs that our current way of doing things exacts on our health and livelihoods absent a pandemic,” Burke told Mongabay. “I know my own carbon footprint is going to go down by probably 75 per cent this year. Hopefully, we can translate these experiments into more durable changes in how we do things, once (hopefully) the epidemic is under control.”If there is any environmental lesson, it’s perhaps the useful reminder of the often-hidden health consequences of the status quo like the substantial costs that our current way of doing things exacts on our health and livelihoods absent a pandemic.
Marshall Burke, environmental resource economist, Stanford University
This story was published with permission from Mongabay.com.