Although we’re all in a lockdown and isolated from everyone and everything, here’s a news that will definitely put a smile on your face. The air pollution is drastically low due to the decreased industrial activity.
The Internet had been flooded with photos of the blue sky above Wuhan and the clear waters in the Venice canals, and those images give hope to the people isolated at home.
All the safety measures applied by the governments around the world have reduced the emission of greenhouse gasses and air pollutants and experts think that if the these measures continue, the levels might be the lowest since more than a decade ago. Air pollution kills more than 7 million people a year.
On the other hand, Forbes Magazine explains that: “the global death toll of an uncontained pandemic remains largely a matter of conjecture.”
“The most dramatic projections that have been released—too hastily to be peer-reviewed—put the global death toll of an unchecked pandemic in the millions—total, not annual. Most credible estimates are much less. Some experts have compared it to the 1957 flu outbreak that killed just over 1 million. The toll from a contained outbreak would, of course, be much smaller.”
Marshall Burke, a Stanford University scientist explains that the 2-month quarantine in China has saved more than 77.000 people from death by air pollution. He also says that the number of saved lives will be 20 times the number of coronavirus.
“More than likely the number of lives that would be spared because of these confinement measures would be higher than the number of lives that would be lost because of the pandemic [had it not been contained]. These are fascinating times. What surprises me most is that the measures that we are ready to take to face this coronavirus are much more severe than the measures we would be ready to take to face climate change or atmospheric pollution.I think this is something that should question us: why are we so much more afraid of the coronavirus than we are of climate change or atmospheric pollution or other kinds of threats. What is so special about the coronavirus that we are ready to put the whole world on lockdown because of that?”, explains François Gemenne, director of The Hugo Observatory that studies interactions between human migration and environmental changes.