Thick smog blankets Delhi as Covid-19 gets new ally in air pollution

New Delhi’s air quality was running at levels considered hazardous for three consecutive days earlier this week

Winter, smog, fog, pollution, air, railways, climate

The thick smog that blankets northern India with the approach of winter has a particularly grim ally this year: Covid-19. Air pollution from the annual burning of rice stubble across the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab is reversing the gains that gave the north of the country its cleanest air in two decades under lockdown earlier this year.

New Delhi’s air quality was running at levels considered hazardous for three consecutive days earlier this week, and the usual peak in pollution around the Diwali festival won’t even hit until Saturday. In Alipur in the north of the capital, an air quality index that conventionally tops out at 500 posted an off-the-charts reading of 851 Monday.

That’s particularly troubling given the evidence that Delhi air pollution is a major factor raising the risk of dying from coronavirus. The decline in pollution and road accidents under lockdown meant that Delhi, paradoxically, saw an improvement in overall mortality rates in the early months of the pandemic, because the baseline of deaths from normal economic activity is already so high. With polluted winter weather, restrictions being further relaxed, and a two-month fall in death totals levelling off in recent days, India’s remarkably effective public health efforts against Covid are about to be put to the test.

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