90 Days of COVID-19 Social Distancing and Its Impacts on Air Quality and Health in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a unique situation for humanity, reaching up to 5623 deaths in Sao Paulo city during the analyzed period of this study. Due to the measures for social distancing, an improvement of air quality was observed worldwide. In view of this scenario, we investigated the air quality improvement related to PM10, PM2.5, and NO2 concentrations during 90 days of quarantine compared to an equivalent period in 2019. We found a significant drop in air pollution of 45% of PM10, 46% of PM2.5, and 58% of NO2, and using a relative-risk function, we estimated that this significant air quality improvement avoided, respectively, 78, 337, and 387 premature deaths, respectively, and prevented approximately US$ 720 million on health costs. Moreover, we estimated that 5,623 deaths by COVID-19 represent an economic health loss of US$ 10.5 billion. Both health and economic gains associated with air pollution reductions give a positive perspective of the efforts towards keeping air pollution reduced even after the pandemic, highlighting the importance of improving the strategies of air pollution mitigation actions, as well as the crucial role of adopting efficient measures to protect human health both during and after the COVID-19 global health crisis.

Practical Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Indoor Air Quality and Thermal Comfort in Kindergartens. A Case Study of Slovenia

“…instructions regarding the sanitary and hygiene regimes in buildings (room hygiene, hand hygiene, cough etiquette, disinfection, ventilation, mask-wearing, etc. ), and (2). organizational measures (instructions on maintaining physical distance, aiming to reduce contact between the occupants).…”

“…With the COVID-19 outbreak, humanity has been facing challenges, which have had an impact on every aspect of society, health, economy, culture, etc. Changes due to COVID-19 have also had environmental impacts on air quality and pollution [1][2][3], indoor air quality in schools [4,5], energy consumption [6] and on the built environment [7][8][9].…”

Promoting Sustainability: Wastewater Treatment Plants as a Source of Biomethane in Regions Far from a High-Pressure Grid. A Real Portuguese Case Study

“…In connection with the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the investment in renewable energy production plants is a need to boost the sustainability and the resilience of our society. As recently claimed by some authors, air quality improved considerably after three months of the pandemic, revealing that our energy sector must shift towards a more sustainable one [71]. However, this is not a task only for the energy sector but a global effort of our society, including other sectors, such as the transport [72] or food industry [73].…”

Trends of CO and NO2 Pollutants Change in Iran during Covid-19 Pandemic using Time-Series Sentinel-5 Images in Google Earth Engine

“…Extensive studies have been conducted worldwide to analyze the impact of Coronavirus spread on air pollution. For example, the effects of pollutants change due to decline in anthropogenic activities as a result of Covid-19 have been investigated in U.S. (Berman & Ebisu, 2020;Naeger & Murphy, 2020;, England (Travaglio et al, 2021;Wyche et al, 2021), Italy (Fattorini & Regoli, 2020;Filippini et al, 2021), Spain (Briz-Redón et al, 2021;Cárcel-Carrasco et al, 2021;Querol et al, 2021;Tobías et al, 2020), India (Karuppasamy et al, 2020;Naqvi et al, 2021;Shehzad et al, 2020;Vadrevu et al, 2020), South Korea (Ju et al, 2021), China (Chen et al, 2020;Fan et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2021;Zhu et al, 2020), Netherlands (Cole et al, 2020), Canada (Adams, 2020), France (Magazzino et al, 2020), Brazil (Debone et al, 2020;Nakada & Urban, 2020), Asia (Ghahremanloo et al, 2021;Gupta et al, 2021), Europe (Ogen, 2020;Skirienė & Stasiškienė, 2021), and worldwide (Albayati et al, 2021;Gautam, 2020;Muhammad et al, 2020;Pozzer et al, 2020;Singh et al, 2021;Zambrano-Monserrate et al, 2020). A few studies have also assessed the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on air pollution in Iran.…”