In China, the shutdowns to contain COVID-19 have stalled so many industries and kept so many vehicles off the road that the virus has indirectly saved lives by cutting down on the country’s deadly air pollution. And no paltry number of lives either. Conservative estimates project that 4,000 small children under the age of 5 and 73,000 elderly Chinese adults over the age of 70 would have died in a business-as-usual scenario. Meanwhile, in Italy, which has now surpassed China’s death toll with what is now the deadliest coronavirus outbreak in the world, electric power demand has slumped an impressive 7 percent , oil demand has dropped 7 percent globally along with a massive oil price crash, and in the United States, where the worst of the virus hasn’t even hit yet, the gross domestic product is projected to contract at a rate of 5 percent in the coming […]