![]() In the last decades, air pollution has become a major threat to health and wellbeing in several countries of the world, most of them being urban or highly populated areas. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Data are uploaded to the Open Science Framework repository, the DOI is 10.17605/OSF.IO/4UZPA."įunding: The work has been funded by the European Commission with Grant Agreements GA-727816 and GA-101016233. ![]() Received: JAccepted: JanuPublished: March 28, 2022Ĭopyright: © 2022 Pala et al. PLoS ONE 17(3):Įditor: Zongbo Shi, University of Birmingham, UNITED KINGDOM Differences can be noticed analyzing daily pollution trends too, as-compared to the study period in 2019-during the study period in 2020 pollution was higher in the morning and lower in the remaining hours.Ĭitation: Pala D, Casella V, Larizza C, Malovini A, Bellazzi R (2022) Impact of COVID-19 lockdown on PM concentrations in an Italian Northern City: A year-by-year assessment. Our results show that, on a global scale, there was a statistically significant reduction in terms of PM levels taking into account meteorological variables that can influence pollution such as wind, temperature, humidity, rain and solar radiation. In this study, we report the case study of the city of Pavia, where data coming from 23 air quality sensors were analyzed to compare the levels measured during the lockdown with the ones coming from the same period in 2019. Differently from some areas in the world, a drastic decrease in pollution measured in terms of particulate matter (PM) was not observed in the Po Valley during the lockdown, suggesting that several external factors can play a role in determining the severity of pollution. ![]() This situation created the condition to study how significant is the impact of car traffic and industrial activity on the pollution in the area, as these factors were strongly reduced during the lockdown. ![]() In February 2020, this area was the first in Europe to be severely hit by the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing the COVID-19 disease, to which the Italian government reacted with the establishment of a drastic lockdown. Public health authorities and local administrations are aware of this problem, and periodically intervene with temporary traffic limitations and other regulations, often insufficient to solve the problem. In Europe, air pollution is a serious concern that affects several areas, one of the worst ones being northern Italy, and in particular the Po Valley, an area characterized by low air quality due to a combination of high population density, industrial activity, geographical factors and weather conditions. In the last century, the increase in traffic, human activities and industrial production have led to a diffuse presence of air pollution, which causes an increase of risk of several health conditions such as respiratory diseases. ![]()
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