Flutterby™! : Air pollution and distancing

So in the months ahead, as we start to unroll all of the social changes we've made to slow the spread of COVID-19, we should look at all the lives we've saved through other means and figure out how we can rebuild our daily living in ways that don't mean four million premature deaths around the world annually.

Things like reducing automobile capacity and dedicating those streets back over to bicycle and pedestrian traffic, in the ways that Oakland is doing, have the ability to hugely improve quality of life, and reduce imposed externalities.

Air quality improves by up to 40 per cent in cities that took action on COVID-19, University of Toronto researcher finds

Marc Cadotte, a professor in the department of biological sciences at U of T Scarborough, looked at the air quality index (AQI) for six COVID-19-affected cities (Wuhan, Hong Kong, Kyoto, Milan, Seoul and Shanghai) that implemented emergency measures in February. He then compared the AQI for those cities to the same month in 2019, finding that all six showed a significant reduction in air pollution concentrations this year.