More than 800 deaths may have been averted thanks to better air quality during Europe’s first catastrophe to stem the new coronavirus pandemic, announced today at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-04277 -6 the Office for Climate Change (CAMS) of the EU Copernicus program.
Comparing the world’s exposure to air pollution between February and July 2020 in 47 major cities, the scientists concluded that government measures to curb the spread of the new coronavirus protected people from deadly pollution.
The peer-reviewed study found that closing schools, stay-at-home policies and canceling events had the strongest impact on levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a harmful gas produced largely by vehicles.
Restrictions on domestic and international travel, on the other hand, have been shown to have little impact on local air pollution.
Nitrogen dioxide is linked to some respiratory and heart diseases and, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA), is responsible for 50,000 premature deaths in the EU each year.
The study showed that cities in France, Spain and Italy saw NO2 levels fall between 50% and 60% during this period. The authors of the report based their calculation on the deaths avoided in the changes observed in the pollutant concentrations on a daily basis, as well as in the exposure to them, according to CAMS.
Paris, London, Barcelona and Milan are among the cities where most deaths were averted due to government restrictions.
“The effectiveness of some of the measures is clear,” said CAMS director Bensan-Henri Peck, who described the findings as “extremely important”.
Professor Antonio Gasparin of the London School of Health and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), who co-authored the research, added that this information could be used to design better policies to address air pollution.
“This ‘natural experiment’ gave us a taste of how air quality could be improved with drastic public health measures that would be difficult to implement under normal conditions,” he said.
The European Environment Agency estimated in December that exposure to particulate matter caused some 307,000 premature deaths in the EU in the year before the pandemic.
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