Fluctuations in environmental pollutants and air quality during the lockdown in the USA and China: two sides of COVID-19
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Fluctuations in environmental pollutants and air quality during the lockdown in the USA and China: two sides of COVID-19 pandemic Awais Shakoor 1 & Xiaoyong Chen 3 & Taimoor Hassan Farooq 2,3 Najam e Sahar 7 & Wende Yan 2,3
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& Umer Shahzad & Fatima Ashraf & Abdul Rehman &
Received: 28 June 2020 / Accepted: 22 July 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The World Health Organization declared the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Due to the global threat, many countries impose immediate lockdown. The impact of lockdown on the environmental pollutants and climate indicators gained considerable attention in the literature. This study aims to describe the variations in the environmental pollutants (CO, NO2, SO2, PM2.5 and PM10) with and without the lockdown period in the majorly hit states and provinces of the USA and China, respectively. Data during the first quarter year of 2019 and 2020 (lockdown period) was used in this study. Moreover, the effect of these pollutants on the pandemic spread was also studied. The results illustrated that the overall concentrations of CO, NO2 and PM2.5 were decreased by 19.28%, 36.7% and 1.10%, respectively, while PM10 and SO2 were increased by 27.81% and 3.81% respectively in five selected states of the USA during the lockdown period. However, in the case of chosen provinces of China, overall, the concentrations of all selected pollutants, i.e., CO, NO2, SO2, PM2.5 and PM10, were reduced by 26.53%, 38.98%, 18.36%, 17.78% and 37.85%, respectively. The COVID-19 reported cases and deaths were significantly correlated with NO2, PM2.5 and PM10 in both China and the USA. The findings of this study concluded that the limited anthropogenic activities in the lockdown situation due to this novel pandemic disease result in a significant improvement of air quality by reducing the concentrations of environmental pollutants. As the trend goes on, the reduction of most pollutant concentrations is expected as long as partial or complete lockdown goes on. Keywords Coronavirus . Environmental gradients . USA . China . PM2.5 . PM10
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-020-00888-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Taimoor Hassan Farooq [email protected] * Wende Yan [email protected] 1
Department of Environment and Soil Sciences, University of Lleida, Avinguda Alcalde Rovira Roure 191, 25198 Lleida, Spain
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College of Life Science and Technology, Central South University of Forestry and Technology, Changsha 410004, Hunan Province, People’s Republic of China
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National Engineering Laboratory for Applied Technology of Forestry and Ecology in South China, Changsha 410004, Hunan Province, People’s Republic of China
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Department of Chemistry, Lahore College for Women University, Lahore, Pakistan
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CAS-Key Laboratory of Crust-Mantle Materials and the Environments, School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Tec
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