The Impact of the Wuhan Covid-19 lockdown on air pollution and health: a machine learning and augmented synthetic control approach

We quantify the impact of the Wuhan Covid-19 lockdown on concentrations of four air pollutants using a two-step approach. First, we use machine learning to remove the confounding effects of weather conditions on pollution concentrations. Second, we use a new augmented synthetic control method (Ben-Michael et al. in The augmented synthetic control method. University of California Berkeley, Mimeo, 2019. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.04170.pdf) to estimate the impact of the lockdown on weather normalised pollution relative to a control group of cities that were not in lockdown. We find NO₂ concentrations fell by as much as 24 μ g/m³ during the lockdown (a reduction of 63% from the pre-lockdown level), while PM10 concentrations fell by a similar amount but for a shorter period. The lockdown had no discernible impact on concentrations of SO₂ or CO. We calculate that the reduction of NO₂ concentrations could have prevented as many as 496 deaths in Wuhan city, 3368 deaths in Hubei province and 10,822 deaths in China as a whole.