The impact of COVID-19 lockdown on the air quality of Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia
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The impact of COVID-19 lockdown on the air quality of Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia Ismail Anil 1 & Omar Alagha 1 Received: 9 August 2020 / Accepted: 21 August 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Since the identification of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, the death toll from the direct infection by COVID-19 has exceeded 775,000, and more than 21 million cases have been reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) around the world. It is strongly believed that its impact might be worsened by poor outdoor and indoor air qualities, particularly on older adults. The nationwide lockdown measures were imposed between March 23 and June 20, 2020, to stop the spread of COVID-19 pandemic in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). In this work, the possible effects of the lockdown on the air quality were investigated using meteorological and air quality datasets obtained from eight monitoring stations covering the Eastern Province of the KSA. The studied air pollutants include carbon monoxide (CO), sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ozone (O3), and inhalable particulate matter (PM10). The NO2 was found to be the marker pollutant responding best to the lockdown measures since its concentrations decreased at all sites during- and post-lockdown periods and ranged between 12– 86% and 14–81%, respectively. Compared with pre-lockdown period, the Eastern Province also experienced significant concentration reductions at varying rates for PM10 (21–70%), CO (5.8–55%), and SO2 (8.7–30%), while O3 concentrations showed increasing rates ranging between 6.3 and 45%. The consequences of these reductions were reflected in easing the outdoor air quality, which might reduce the impact of COVID-19 pandemic, especially on elderly and sensitive groups. Keywords COVID-19 . Sars-Cov-2 . Lockdown . Air pollution . Air quality . Saudi Arabia
Introduction The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on Wednesday, March 11, 2020, the new coronavirus “COVID19” disease as “a global epidemic” (WHO 2020). In response to that, governments around the world have been taking a range of actions and measures, including the closing of schools, worship places, and workplaces, postponing and canceling huge public events, restricting public transport, the lockdown of movement of people, and ceasing domestic and international flights (Bherwani et al. 2020; Bashir et al. 2020a). According to many studies, the COVID-19 is believed to transmit through airborne bioaerosol droplets. Nevertheless, different parameters such as the extent of urban air pollution and weather conditions might have a significant
* Omar Alagha [email protected] 1
Environmental Engineering Department, College of Engineering A13,, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Main Campus, P.O. Box 1982, Dammam 34212, Saudi Arabia
impact on the elevated rates of COVID-19 cases (Farhan Bashir et al. 2020; Fareed et al. 2020). After the discovery of the first case of COVID-19 in the KSA on March 2, 2020, a series of actions were taken in response to the COVID-19
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