Written by Khushii Chowdhary – a grade 12 student

Corona Virus has become one of the most worrying problems on the planet these days. It has had disastrous effects on public health and has put enormous strain on healthcare systems around the world.  

There are approximately half a million confirmed cases of this fatal disease across the globe. Italy has the highest number of cases surpassing China. It has been reported that there have been 919 deaths in Italy due to Covid-19 in the past 24 hours. There are close to 900 confirmed cases all over India with 19 deaths. There have been approximately 28000 deaths across the world.

But every cloud has a silver lining and in this case the benefactor seems to be the environment.

VENICE: The crowds of tourists who normally swarm the Venice canals are gone and the number of motorboats vastly reduced. As a result the normally polluted waters of the canals are clearer than ever before

CHINA: The NASA reports have shown that in China, the nitrogen dioxide pollution has majorly reduced since the lockdown begun.

ITALY: Even though Italy is massively affected by this disease, the positive effect is that dolphins have returned to the coastline, the country is breathing cleaner air and the CO2 levels have decreased leading to a decrease in Global Warming

INDIA: In India till a few months back, the increase in pollution had lead to many deaths. In Delhi, the air quality index (AQI) had reached 600 which is considered hazardous, however, due to the lockdown the present day AQI is 37 which is terrific!

Across the world, the streets have emptied, vehicles and factories have shut down and flights have been grounded. This has positively affected the reduction of CO₂ emission and the whole wave the destruction associated with holiday and professional conference tourism. Although this is good news, it is delivered with caution. Environmentalists have warned that the reduction is temporary, and that a government stimulus – if directed at ramping up production among heavy polluters – could reverse the environmental gains.

After the coronavirus calms down, it is quite likely we will observe a round of so-called ‘retaliatory pollutions’  like  factories maximising production to compensate for their losses during the shutdown period.

Therefore, the change in environment is short lived and we can face a relapse of higher magnitude of global warming, pollution and climate change. In order to ensure a permanent change, it is said that drastic measures should be taken but in my opinion it a slow process and cannot be done overnight. Steps should be taken , laws should be made , implemented and followed by every person alive , action should be taken against anybody who disobeys.  So to conclude , this pandemic has uncountable negative effects but in the same breath it has benefitted the environment massively and to keep it this way various steps should be taken to avoid the major environment problem of Climate Change coming up in the near future.

Written by Khushii Chowdhary