write an article on effects of lockdown on pollution
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Answer:
Worldwide spread of COVID-19 in a quite short time has brought a dramatic decrease in industrial activities, road traffic and tourism. Restricted human interaction with nature during this crisis time has appeared as a blessing for nature and environment. Reports from all over the world are indicating that after the outbreak of COVID-19, environmental conditions including air quality and water quality in rivers are improving and wildlife is blooming. India has always been a hub of pollution with huge population, heavy traffics and polluting industries leading to high air quality index (AQI) values in all major cities. But after declaration of lockdown due to COVID-19, quality of air has started to improve and all other environmental parameters such as water quality in rivers have started giving a positive sign towards restoring. This paper provides evidence-based insight into improvement of air quality and environment during pre and post lockdown of this pandemic situation. An attempt has been made to visualize the improvement in the air quality using tools like satellite images of Indian atmosphere, results of onsite real-time monitoring at specific locations (Ghaziabad-highest polluting city of India) and Air quality index (AQI) calculated by central pollution control board of India.
Keywords: Covid 19, Pandemic situation, Lockdown, Air quality index, Central pollution control board
Answer:
Worldwide spread of COVID-19 in a quite short time has brought a dramatic decrease in industrial activities, road traffic and tourism. Restricted human interaction with nature during this crisis time has appeared as a blessing for nature and environment. Reports from all over the world are indicating that after the outbreak of COVID-19, environmental conditions including air quality and water quality in rivers are improving and wildlife is blooming. India has always been a hub of pollution with huge population, heavy traffics and polluting industries leading to high air quality index (AQI) values in all major cities. But after declaration of lockdown due to COVID-19, quality of air has started to improve and all other environmental parameters such as water quality in rivers have started giving a positive sign towards restoring. This paper provides evidence-based insight into improvement of air quality and environment during pre and post lockdown of this pandemic situation. An attempt has been made to visualize the improvement in the air quality using tools like satellite images of Indian atmosphere, results of onsite real-time monitoring at specific locations (Ghaziabad-highest polluting city of India) and Air quality index (AQI) calculated by central pollution control board of India.
Keywords: Covid 19, Pandemic situation, Lockdown, Air quality index, Central pollution control board
Coronaviruses (CoVs) are a group of viruses which affects human beings through zoonotic transmission. This is the third time in past two decades that novel virus has created pandemic condition, after Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and Middle East Respiratory syndrome corona virus (MERSCoV) in 2012 (Ramdan and Shaib, 2019; Zhong et al., 2003). Pertaining to the Corona virus (2019), it was on December 31, 2019 wherein first case was reported to WHO Country Office in Wuhan, China with symptoms of unexplained low respiratory infections. This was classified as “pneumonia of unknown etiology” as the cause of infection was not known. On January 12, 2020, WHO found that Corona virus was the reason of this infection in Wuhan and later on 11th February, WHO Director-General announced this novel CoV as ‘COVID-19’ which is an acronym of ‘Corona virus disease 2019’ (Cascella et al., 2020). Covid-19 contain a single-stranded RNA as nuclei material and are 65 nm - 125 nm in diameter (Shereen et al., 2020). The major causes of concern for Covid-19 includes its global scale transmission, repeated emergence, significant number of deaths, infection and mortality to care providers and multiplicative effect in vulnerable or susceptible groups.
Covid-19 was declared pandemic disease by Director General-WHO on 11th March, he also briefed regarding the 13-fold increase in positive cases in China and 114 countries suffering form 1, 18,000 positive cases and 4291 deaths till date (World Health Organization, 2020). In India the first confirmed positive case was reported on 30th January in a student from Thrissur district of Kerala who had returned home for a vacation from Wuhan University in China (India Today, 2020a) followed by two other cases on February 2 and 3 again in Kerala having the same history. As on 14th April, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare (MOHFW) reported 10,815 positive cases and 358 deaths covering 32 states in India. Fig. 1 shows the spread of COVID-19 from January 30, 2020 to April 14, 2020. It is evident from the figure that spread of corona virus became rapid after 15 March and started taking a horrible shape in entire country.
Presently in comparison to the top six affected countries viz USA, Italy, Spain, China, Germany and Iran, we in India have lesser capacity to serve patients. With a population of 1.2 billion, India has only 118 Government approved testing laboratories, 1.1363 beds per thousand patients (China has 4.2) and more than one million tests done. On the contrary, India has the highest recovery rate of 41.39% as compared to Italy (16.91%) and USA (3.17%) which is the direct effect of lockdown. Although, the researchers round the globe are rigorously working to find the cure of the infection caused by this deadly virus but unfortunately, till date no definite cure or vaccine has got developed. The only way to control the spread of this virus at this moment is suggested to be “social distancing”, which is being practiced by many countries at this crisis time and has led to reduction GHG emissions in air (Zambrano-Monserrate et al., 2020) at global level.
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