Photo by Thom Holmes on Unsplash

updated with latest data till 4th April

You may have seen the tweets, or even worse, you may have even shared the news; that there are dolphins and swans in Venice or there are elephants in China, all roaming around freely in this fresh and pure human-free world. We all want to believe in something good in this torrid time but it turns out those news and images were fake, well not totally fake, just not related to the current coronavirus lockdown throughout the world. Dolphins and swans were always in Venice and the photo of elephants is an old one.

So the question arises is if it’s the same old earth or is it just a little bit better? To cut through the noise and uncover the real truth, I decided to go through the data. Air Quality Index(AQI) is a pretty robust metric which reflects the air pollution levels and hence a very good way to understand the impact of the lockdown, at least on our lower atmosphere. You can see the variations of pollutant levels over the world with each passing week here at CovidExplore.com.

NO2 concentration since the 1st week of 2020. The Climate Side of COVID-19

I know, right? You can see the drastic differences between the end of January (week 5) and right now. Specifically, the NO2 levels have taken a huge hit since there are practically no cars on the street and very few industries operating. The most differences will be seen for Italy, Spain, Iran where the most stringent lockdowns are in place to tackle the widespread of the virus.

CovidExplore.com was created with this github repository: https://github.com/mayukh18/covidexplore .

Now let’s look at the data and inferences over various places.