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The Covid-19 pandemic, which has already claimed a minimum of 380,000 confirmed deaths worldwide, will not bring any kind of environmental benefit in the Earth's atmosphere, experts have warned and is already being verified in China.

Pollution levels in the large cities of the Asian giant, first to go through the closure of activities, are returning to the usual levels as soon as life and business recover some normality. The same, in all probability, will be happening in the rest of the world .

In fact, the levels in China of various compounds harmful to health in the last 30 days exceed those of the same period in 2019, according to a report by the Center for Research in Energy and Free Air (Crea, for its acronym in English) , which The Guardian has echoed .

For the first time since the outbreak of the health crisis, the presence of various harmful substances, such as PM2.5 microparticles, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), sulfur dioxide (SO2) and tropospheric ozone, has exceeded that observed a year ago. "Air pollutant levels plummeted during the national shutdown in February, bottomed out in early March and have now surpassed their previous levels of the crisis, " summarizes the report.

As Luari Myllyvirta, chief analyst at Crea, explained in The Guardian , China's "rebound" is an "early warning" of what's going to happen in other fossil fuel-dependent economies. "Highly polluting industries have recovered faster from the crisis than the rest of the economy," says this expert.

Rebound effect

"The rebound appears to be due to industrial emissions, as pollution levels in the largest cities, Beijing and Shanghai, are still below last year," summarizes the report. "Overall, pollution levels tended to grow the most in areas where burning fossil fuels is a major source of pollution ."

In Wuhan, where the coronavirus outbreak originated, contamination was reduced by almost half during the toughest quarantine measures, but is now only 14% less than last year, close to returning to normal levels.

Experts had already warned that the drastic closure of activities worldwide would have no medium and long-term consequences on air quality. Some even foresaw a possible "rebound effect" . Such was the conclusion of an exhaustive study published by Nature Climate Change two weeks ago, which focused, in this case, on C02, the main cause of the greenhouse effect.

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