With the coronavirus spreading and stay-at-home orders becoming more prevalent we are seeing a drop in emissions resulting in better air quality. People around the US and the World are reporting being able to see further across cities and to hills or mountains. 

COVID-19 was declared a pandemic earlier this month causing industries across the world to shutdown and workers to stay home to avoid further contamination and spreading of the virus. This emergency shutdown has lead to lower air pollution levels around the world. 

Experts are saying that this societal shutdown is creating one of the largest experiments in industrial emission reduction. NO2 levels over cities and industrial areas have decreased significantly in comparison to this same time in 2019. 

Air Quality Research Center Director, Tony Wexler, spoke with Mark Kaufman of Mashable about the smoke and poor air quality in Sydney from the Australia fires. Sydney's pollution levels were more than 11 times the hazardous level. 

In his article, Sydney, engulfed in smoke, has a ghastly air quality problem, Kaufman shares:

The New York Times writer, Nadja Popovich, reports that after nearly a decade of improving the air quality nationally, the US EPA's data shows that PM 2.5 has increased in the past two years. This 180 turn of progress has been identified as likely primarily coming from increases in driving and the burning of natural gas. However, in the West, wildfires has been a large cause of the increase as well. Researchers suggest that due to a decrease of enforcement of the Clean Air Act, less businesses are concerned with their pollution. 

One of the rising causes of air pollution in California are wildfires alongside transportation and landfills.

In Paradise, many families are still combing through the wreckage of the 2018 Camp Fire that burned over 150,000 acres. Camille Von Kaenel of the Chico Enterprise-Record in her article "Residents still trying to understand Camp Fire contamination at standing homes" writes,

Director Tony Wexler was interviewed by Beond.tv recently about how climate change is causing an increased presence of wildfires in California and across the US. Watch the full interview that aired on KDOC here. 

A new school next to a concrete plant in Silicon Valley poses a serious health risk to the children and adults there. 

The National Institutes of Health and several other federal agencies, including OSHA, CDC and the EPA have reported on the health hazards of dust from concrete manufacturing facilities. Ultra-fine particles in the dust can lodge into the lungs, ultimately traveling to the heart. As a result, exposure can cause respiratory problems and even lead to cardiac arrest.

Recently the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) published a report stating that 85% of parks deal with unhealthy air due to ozone. While ozone is thought of typically resulting from vehicle and industrial emissions, park plants also emit compounds that react with NOx gasses to make ozone.