The casual effects of COVID-19 lockdown on air quality and short-term health impacts in China

Highlights: • Causal effect exists between COVID-19 lockdown and air quality changes in China. • Concentrations of all air pollutants decreased due to lockdown, except for ozone. • Changes in air quality are more salient for cities with more confirmed cases. • Reduction of PM_2.5 concentration is associated with large health benefits. The outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19) has forced China to lockdown many cities and restrict transportation, industrial, and social activities. This provides a great opportunity to look at the impacts of pandemic quarantine on air quality and premature death due to exposure to air pollution. In this study, we applied the difference-in-differences (DID) model to quantify the casual impacts of COVID-19 lockdown on air quality at 278 cities across China. A widely used exposure-response function was further utilized to estimate the short-term health impacts associated with changes in PM_2.5 due to lockdown. Results show that lockdown has caused drastic reduction in air pollution level in terms of all criteria pollutants except ozone. On average, concentrations of PM_2.5, PM₁₀, NO₂, SO₂ and CO are estimated to drop by 14.3 μg/m³, 22.2 μg/m³, 17.7 μg/m³, 2.9 μg/m³, and 0.18 mg/m³ as the result of lockdown. Cities with more confirmed cases of COVID-19 are related to stronger responses in air quality, despite that similar lockdown measures were implemented by the local governments. The improvement of air quality caused by COVID-19 lockdown in northern cities is found to be smaller than that of southern cities. Avoided premature death associated with PM_2.5 exposures over the 278 cities was estimated to be 50.8 thousand. Our results re-emphasize the effectiveness of emission controls on air quality and associated health impacts. The high cost of lockdown, still high level of air pollution during lockdown and smaller effects in northern cities implies that source-specific mitigation policies are needed for continuous and sustainable reduction of air pollution.