The Impact of COVID-19 Lockdowns on the Behavior of Italian Citizens and Particulate Matter 10 and 2.5 Emissions in Lombardy
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medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.15.20248285; this version posted December 29, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license . The Impact of COVID-19 Lockdowns on the Behavior of Italian Citizens and Particulate Matter 10 and 2.5 Emissions in Lombardy Alessandro Rovetta1,2 1 Mensana srls, Research and Disclosure Division, Brescia, Italy 2 Redeev srl, Technologic and Scientific Research, Napoli, Italy e-mail: [email protected], ORCID: 0000-0002-4634-279X Keywords: Consumption, COVID-19, Italy, Lockdown, PM10, PM2.5, Sustainability Abstract Italy has been one of the first nations in the world to be heavily affected by the first wave of COVID-19. To date, it is among the first countries for both total cases of contagion and deaths. A wide range of containment measures have been adopted from February to December 2020 to mitigate the pandemic, including total lockdowns across the entire country. This research sets out to evaluate not only how these restrictions influenced Italian citizens’ consumption habits (such as online shopping, smart working and distance learning) but also the impact of lockdowns on the concentrations of particulate matter (PM) 10 and 2.5 in the Lombardy region. In particular, this survey is aimed at investigating the environmental sustainability of the new individual behaviors after the restrictions imposed by the Government in order to quantify their effects on particulate concentrations in Lombardy, the region most damaged by both COVID-19 and air pollution. Various tools and online platforms have been used to collect data, such as Google Trends, web portals providing statistical and demographic information (e.g. AdminStat Italia and ISTAT, which is the National Institute of Statistics), surveys conducted by the Department of Civil Protection, other scientific studies, and the most reliable national newspapers. Technical data on particulate matter was collected from the website of the Regional Agency for the Protection of the Environment (ARPA). To highlight any significant change, the average daily concentrations of PM10 and 2.5 during 2020 in all the provinces of Lombardy were compared with those of the previous year. The comparison between the mean values was made through the t-test. Two values were considered as statistically confident when 푡 < 1.5. However, since the real significance of these thresholds is not easily determined, some margins of suspicious confidence have been kept. Finally, using Pearson and Spearman correlations, possible causal correlations between changes in citizens’ behavior and specific key events related to COVID-19 have been dealt with. The P-value threshold was indicatively set at 0.05. Microsoft Excel 2020 and Google Sheets were used as data analysis software. In conclusion, this paper showed a substantial ineffectiveness of total and partial lockdowns in NOTE: This preprint reports new research that has not been certified by peer review and should not be used to guide clinical practice. reducing PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations in Lombardy. Furthermore, it has been medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.15.20248285; this version posted December 29, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license . estimated that COVID-19 has significantly changed the consumption habits of Italian citizens, thus leading to both positive and negative results in terms of sustainability. For instance, a sharp rise in the usage of home delivery services is posing a potential additional threat to the environment at present. At the same time, a positive aspect of this change is the spread of digital literacy, as Italians got quickly acquainted with the most modern technologies for distant learning and smart working, thus paving the way for the establishment of energetically and environmentally sustainable policies throughout the country. 1. Introduction The COVID-19 disease has raged around the world, radically changing habits and feelings of global citizens of all ages and statuses, thus causing deep economic and health crises in all the pandemic stricken-countries (World Health Organization, 20201, Figueroa et al., 2020, Francisco et al., 2020). Among these, Italy is one of the most affected: to date (December 5, 2020), it is the sixth nation in the world for number of deaths from COVID-19, with 1.7 million official cases and 59,000 official deceased (Worldometers, 2020)2. However, during the first pandemic wave, lots of media, websites, and environmental protection agencies highlighted a large amount of beneficial effects of the lockdown on pollution and air quality (FASDA, 2020)3. In this regard, this research focuses mainly on two aspects: i) the concentrations of particulate matter pollutants with a diameter ranging from 2.5 μm to 10 μm (PM10) and less than 2.5 μm (PM2.5) in the Lombardy region, and ii) the increase in the national demand for home food delivery services, food shopping delivery services, general shopping delivery services, smart working, and distant learning. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to quantify the variation in the concentration of PM10 and PM2.5 as well as evaluate the sustainability of the behaviors adopted by citizens in response to restrictions on personal freedom, containment measures, and lockdowns imposed by the government to face the diffusion of SARS-CoV-2. Because of the multifold aim of this paper, it should be borne in mind that only the Lombardy area was considered for analyzing the variations of PM10 and PM2.5 quantities. The reasons for this are that Lombardy has been the most affected region by both COVID-19 and particulate matter and the deep epidemiological link between the latter and SARS- CoV-2 spread (Rovetta and Castaldo, 2020); this makes it suitable for conducting a reliable investigation and generalizing the results through statistical inference. Conversely, as far as the behavioral response in citizens is concerned, the whole Italian nation has been considered since the threat of contagion was perceived similarly in all regions (Rovetta and Castaldo, 2020). To do this, Google Trends - an online tool provided by Google™- was used as it allows users to search for any query 1 https://www.who.int/news/item/13-10-2020-impact-of-covid-19-on-people's-livelihoods-their-health- and-our-food-systems 2 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ 3 https://www.fasda.it/effetti-quarantena-ambiente/ medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.15.20248285; this version posted December 29, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license . and visualize and quantify the trend over time of the web interest in it in any region of the world. This infoveillance tool is being increasingly exploited by the scientific community for investigating users’ behavior and creating predictive models (Jimenez et al., 2020). 2. Methods 2.1 Data collection Google Trends4 has been used to explore Italian citizens’ web interest in home food delivery services, food shopping services, shopping services, and smart working software and online learning platforms, during and after the first COVID-19 restrictions and containment measures. Google Trends is a web tool which provides normalized values, called “relative search volumes (RSV)”, ranging from 0 (very low relative interest) to 100 (very high relative interest). All the search parameters and queries are shown in Table 1. PM10 and 2.5 daily averages data were collected from all the measuring stations of every province of Lombardy. To do that, the Regional Agency for Environmental Protection (ARPA) official website5 was used. Data on COVID-19 cases and deaths was collected from the Department of Civil Protection official website6. Meteorological data was collected from the website "Il Meteo.it"7. Topic Query term Category Sampling frequency Home food just eat All 1/week delivery uber eats services deliveroo glovo foodracers Food shopping esselunga online All 1/week delivery spesa online (online food services shopping) carrefour online conad online iperal online Shopping amazon All 1/week delivery ebay services Smart working DAD + Teams + Zoom + Meet + All 1/week and distance Skype learning Table 1. Google Trends queries and search parameters. 4 https://trends.google.com/trends/ 5 https://www.arpalombardia.it/Pages/Aria/Richiesta-Dati.aspx 6 https://github.com/pcm-dpc/COVID-19 7 https://www.ilmeteo.it/portale/archivio-meteo/Lombardia medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.12.15.20248285; this version posted December 29, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license . 2.2 Statistical Analysis This paper quantifies the impact of COVID-19 restrictions and containment measures on the web queries RSVs and average concentrations of PM10 and 2.5 through the percentage increases 훥% = (푥1 − 푥0)/푥0 ⋅ 100 and their related t-test 푡 = (푥1 − 푥0)/휎. All statistical errors 휎 were calculated with the standard propagation formula (Taylor, 1997). Each mean value 푥 was reported together with its own standard error of the mean (푆퐸푀) according to the following modality: 푥 ± 푆퐸푀 (Taylor, 1997).