Air quality trends and implications pre and post Covid-19 restrictions.

Air pollution causes millions of premature deaths every year. Thus, air quality assessment is essential to preserve human health and support authorities to identify proper policies. In this study, concentration levels of 6 air contaminants (benzene, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, ground level ozone, particulate matters) as monitored in 2019, 2020 and 2021 by 37 stations, located in Campania (Italy) were analysed. Particular attention has been paid to March-April 2020 period to get clues on the possible effects of the lockdown regulations, imposed in Italy from March 9th to May 4th to limit COVID-19 spread, on atmospheric pollution. Air Quality Index (AQI), an algorithm developed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US-EPA), allowed us to classify the air quality from moderately unhealthy to good for sensitive groups. The evaluation of air pollution impact on human health by using the AirQ+ software evidenced a significant decrement of adult mortality in 2020 respect to 2019 and 2021. Among the six pollutants considered, PM

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Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.