The COVID-19 pandemic has caused, in general, a sharp reduction in traffic and industrial activities. This in turn leaded to a reduction in air pollution around the world. It is important to quantity the amount of that reduction in order to estimate the influence weight of traffic and industrial activities over the total variation of air quality. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on air pollution in Israel, which is considered one of the countries with a higher air pollution than other Western countries. The results reveal two main findings: 1. During the COVID-19 outbreak, relative to its earlier closest period, the pollution from transport, based on Nitrogen oxides, had reduced by 40$\%$ on average, whereas the pollution from industrial, based on Grand-level ozone, had increased by 34$\%$ on average. Relative to 2019, the COVID-19 outbreak caused a reduction in air pollution from transport and industrial as well. 2. The explanation percent of the time period of COVID-19 is at most 22$\%$ over the total variation of each pollutant amount.
Given the severe impact of COVID-19 on several societal levels, it is of crucial importance to model the impact of restriction measures on the pandemic evolution, so that governments are able to take informed decisions. Even though there have been countless attempts to propose diverse models since the raise of the outbreak, the increase in data availability and start of vaccination campaigns calls for updated models and studies. Furthermore, most of the works are focused on a very particular place or application and we strive to attain a more general model, resorting to data from different cou…
Air pollution is among the highest contributors to mortality worldwide, especially in urban areas. During spring 2020, many countries enacted social distancing measures in order to slow down the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. A particularly drastic measure, the 'lockdown', urged people to stay at home and thereby prevent new COVID-19 infections during the first (2020) and second wave (2021) of the pandemic. In turn, it also reduced traffic and industrial activities. But how much did these lockdown measures improve air quality in large cities, and are there differences in how air quality was affect…
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, almost all non-essential activities in Morocco have been halted since March 15, 2020. In this sense, several measures have been taken to mitigate the effects of this pandemic. Morocco has been on lockdown since March 20, 2020. The main objective of this paper is to study the effects of the lockdown measures on air quality, by presenting the spatio-temporal evolution of PM2,5 and NO2 pollutants, based on satellite data from Sentinel 5P and MERRA. Then, these results are compared to the data predicted by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). Results s…
Air pollution is a threat to human health, in particular since it aggravates respiratory diseases. Early COVID-19 outbreaks in Wuhan, China and Lombardy, Italy coincided with high levels of air pollution drawing attention to a potential role of particulate matter and other pollutants in infections and more severe outcomes of the new lung disease. Both air pollution and COVID-19 outcomes are driven by human mobility and economic activity leading to spurious correlations in regression estimates. We use district-level panel data from Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the US to estimate…
Air pollution has been a long-existing problem for most of the major metropolitan cities of the world. Several measures including strict climate laws and reduction in the number of vehicles were implemented by several nations. However, in the recent wake of the COVID19 pandemic, there has been a renewed interest in revisiting the problem of low air quality. Several countries implemented strict lockdown measures halting the vehicular traffic and other economic activities, in order to reduce the spread of COVID19. In this paper, we analyze the impact of such COVID19-induced lockdown on the air q…
A country-wide `lock-down' imposed on the 23red March 2020 in the UK had a significant impact on the UK's anthropogenic movements. The closure of work-places and restrictions imposed on visiting friends and family has radically reduced the amount of traffic on the roads. In this short communication, we use data from UK air-quality sensors to quantify air pollution trends pre- and post-lock-down. While we detect large falls in nitrogen dioxide at levels not seen over the last decade, trends in other pollutants were mixed especially when compared to historical data. It suggests that the implicat…
Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University（贝拿勒斯印度大学科学学院）；Assam University（阿萨姆大学）
The purpose of this study has extremely dedicated to exposing the correlation between coronavirus pandemic and space observation on unhealthy air quality in India. The world has undergone lockdown to break the chain of coronavirus infection. The Air Quality Index (AQI) has started to improve after the commencement of lockdown due to industrial and transportation sectors temporally closed. This study compiled the data recently released by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), ESA (European Space Agency), and ISRO (Indian Space and Research Organization). In this paper, we have d…
The current outbreak of COVID-19 is an unprecedented event in air transportation. While it was known that air transportation plays a key role in the spread of a pandemic, it is probably the first time that global aviation contributed to the planet-wide spread of a pandemic, with over 500,000 reported casualties related to the infection. In this study, we perform an analysis of the role air transportation played and how the air transportation system was changed throughout the ongoing pandemic. The major decision makers were countries (governments) and airlines, who were involved mostly in the d…
The first goal of this study is to quantify the magnitude and spatial variability of air quality changes in the US during the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on two federally regulated pollutants, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and fine particulate matter (PM2.5). Observed concentrations at all available ground monitoring sites (240 and 480 for NO2 and PM2.5, respectively) were compared between April 2020 and April of the prior five years, 2015-2019, as the baseline. Large statistically significant decreases in NO2 concentrations were found at more than 65% of the monitoring sites, with an average drop o…
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have implemented policies to curb the spread of the novel virus. Little is known about how these policies impact various groups in society. This paper explores the relationship between social distancing policies, traffic volumes and air quality and how they impact various socioeconomic groups. This study aims to understand how disparate communities respond to Stay-at-Home Orders and other social distancing policies to understand how human behavior in response to policy may play a part in the prevalence of COVID-19 positive cases. We collected d…
The COVID-19 outbreak greatly limited human activities and reduced primary emissions particularly from urban on-road vehicles, but coincided with Beijing experiencing pandemic haze, raising the public concerns of the validity and effectiveness of the imposed traffic policies to improve the air pollution. Here, we explored the relationship between local vehicle emissions and the winter haze in Beijing before and during the COVID-19 lockdown period based on an integrated analysis framework, which combines a real-time on-road emission inventory, in-situ air quality observations and a localized ch…
Covid-19 has had a disastrous economic impact on countries and industries as countries have gone through the lockdown process to reduce the health impact of Covid-19. As countries have started lifting Covid-19 related restrictions, businesses have been allowed to again have on-site customers. However, just a limited number of people are being allowed on-site as long as social distancing measures are being followed. This has resulted in heavy burdens on businesses as their number of customers have decreased substantially. In this study, we propose a model to minimize the economic impact of Covi…
In this paper, we introduce a novel modeling framework for incorporating fear of infection and frustration with social distancing into disease dynamics. We show that the resulting SEIR behavior-perception model has three principal modes of qualitative behavior---no outbreak, controlled outbreak, and uncontrolled outbreak. We also demonstrate that the model can produce transient and sustained waves of infection consistent with secondary outbreaks. We fit the model to cumulative COVID-19 case and mortality data from several regions. Our analysis suggests that regions which experience a significa…
In order to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on people's lives, activities and the natural environment, this paper investigates the spatial and temporal characteristics of Night Time Light (NTL) radiance and Air Quality Index (AQI) before and during the pandemic in mainland China. Our results show that the monthly average NTL brightness is much lower during the quarantine period than before. This study categorizes NTL into three classes: residential area, transportation and public facilities and commercial centers, with NTL radiance ranges of 5-20, 20-40 and greater than 40 nW/(cm*cm*sr), respec…
The economic downturn and the air travel crisis triggered by the recent coronavirus pandemic pose a substantial threat to the new consumer class of many emerging economies. In Brazil, considerable improvements in social inclusion have fostered the emergence of hundreds of thousands of first-time fliers over the past decades. We apply a two-step regression methodology in which the first step consists of identifying air transport markets characterized by greater social inclusion, using indicators of the local economies' income distribution, credit availability, and access to the Internet. In the…
The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, is currently spreading rapidly throughout the world, causing many deaths and severe economic damage. It is believed that hot and humid conditions do not favor the novel coronavirus, yet this is still under debate due to many uncertainties associated with the COVID-19 data. Here we propose surrogate data tests to examine the preference of this virus to spread under different climate conditions. We find that the disease is significantly (above the 95% confidence level) more common when the temperature is $\sim$10$^\circ$C, the sp…
The main focus of this study is to collect and prepare data on air passengers traffic worldwide with the scope of analyze the impact of travel ban on the aviation sector. Based on historical data from January 2010 till October 2019, a forecasting model is implemented in order to set a reference baseline. Making use of airplane movements extracted from online flight tracking platforms and on-line booking systems, this study presents also a first assessment of recent changes in flight activity around the world as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. To study the effects of air travel ban on aviati…
There have been several documented outbreaks of COVID-19 associated with vocalization, either by speech or by singing, in indoor confined spaces. Here, we model the risk of in-room airborne disease transmission via expiratory particle emission versus the average loudness of vocalization and for variable room ventilation rates. The model indicates that a 6-decibel reduction in average vocalization intensity yields a reduction in aerosol transmission probability equivalent to doubling the room ventilation rate. The results suggest that public health authorities should consider implementing "quie…
The impact of the outbreak of COVID-19 on health has been widely concerned. Disease risk assessment, prediction, and early warning have become a significant research field. Previous research suggests that there is a relationship between air quality and the disease. This paper investigated the impact of the atmospheric environment on the basic reproduction number (R$_0$) in Australia, South Korea, and Italy by using atmospheric environment data, confirmed case data, and the distributed lag non-linear model (DLNM) model based on Quasi-Poisson regression. The results show that the air temperature…
Social-distancing to combat the COVID-19 pandemic has led to widespread reductions in air pollutant emissions. Quantifying these changes requires a business as usual counterfactual that accounts for the synoptic and seasonal variability of air pollutants. We use a machine learning algorithm driven by information from the NASA GEOS-CF model to assess changes in nitrogen dioxide (NO$_{2}$) and ozone (O$_{3}$) at 5,756 observation sites in 46 countries from January through June 2020. Reductions in NO$_{2}$ correlate with timing and intensity of COVID-19 restrictions, ranging from 60% in severely …
This short note provides estimates of the number of passengers that travel from China to all world airports in the period October 2019 - March 2020 on the basis of historical data. From this baseline we subtract the expected reduction in the number of passengers taking into account the temporary ban of some routes which was put in place since 23 January 2020 following the COVID-2019 Coronavirus outbreak. The results indicate a reduction of the number of passengers in the period January - March 2020 of -2.5%. This calculation considers only the complete closure of routes (not just direct flight…
A pandemic caused by a new coronavirus has spread worldwide, affecting Argentina. We implement an SEIR model to analyze the disease evolution in Buenos Aires and neighbouring cities. The model parameters are calibrated using the number of casualties officially reported. Since infinite solutions honour the data, we show different cases. In all of them the reproduction ratio $R_0$ decreases after early lockdown, but then raises, probably due to an increase in contagion in highly populated slums. Therefore it is mandatory to reverse this growing trend in $R_0$ by applying control strategies to av…
Barcelona Supercomputing Center（巴塞罗那超级计算中心）；Tokyo Institute of Technology（东京工业大学）；IBM（国际商业机器公司）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Tokyo Medical and Dental University（东京医科齿科大学）
As COVID-19 transmissions spread worldwide, governments have announced and enforced travel restrictions to prevent further infections. Such restrictions have a direct effect on the volume of international flights among these countries, resulting in extensive social and economic costs. To better understand the situation in a quantitative manner, we used the Opensky network data to clarify flight patterns and flight densities around the world and observe relationships between flight numbers with new infections, and with the economy (unemployment rate) in Barcelona. We found that the number of da…
Since May 2020, several COVID-19 outbreaks have occurred in the German meat industry despite various protective measures, and temperature and ventilation conditions were considered as possible high-risk factors. This cross-sectional study examined meat and poultry plants to examine possible risk factors. Companies completed a self-administered questionnaire on the work environment and protective measures taken to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection. Multivariable logistic regression analysis adjusted for the possibility to distance at least 1.5 meters, break rules, and employment status was performed…
We propose a novel data-driven framework for assessing the a-priori epidemic risk of a geographical area and for identifying high-risk areas within a country. Our risk index is evaluated as a function of three different components: the hazard of the disease, the exposure of the area and the vulnerability of its inhabitants. As an application, we discuss the case of COVID-19 outbreak in Italy. We characterize each of the twenty Italian regions by using available historical data on air pollution, human mobility, winter temperature, housing concentration, health care density, population size and …
