Air pollution: a more serious health problem than COVID-19 in 2020

As a global pandemic, Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses a serious threat to people's health. However, by comparing the deaths caused by COVID-19 and deaths from air pollution in 183 countries, our results show that air pollution was even more of a serious health problem than COVID-19 in 2020. The relative roles of air pollution and COVID-19-attributable deaths across countries were affected by PM2.5 exposure, population age structure, societal development and government policies. The countries with less strict policies during the early stages of COVID-19, to ensure stable economic development, paid more to control COVID-19 deaths in the subsequent stages, and hence showed large GDP reduction percentages in 2020. Our results indicate that the COVID-19 is a serious killer but also that the mortality caused by air pollution is high, which underline the concurrent need to control the dispersion of COVID-19 and improvement of air quality.