COVID-19 meets climate change

Last year’s forest fire season hit the entire West Coast with unprecedented severity. As a result, dangerous air quality came, as residents were exposed to more intense levels of pollution for longer. Now, a new report from IQAir, an air purifier company that does annual global air quality surveys, concluded that the fires helped make North America the only place in the world where air quality worsened in 2020.

Collecting data from governments and non-governmental organizations that monitor air quality, IQAir found that 77 of the 100 most polluted cities in the world were concentrated in California, Oregon and Washington last September, which accompanies the forest fire season. In 2020, 38% of U.S. cities included in its database exceeded the World Health Organization’s target levels for PM2.5, or fine particles. This is a sharp increase compared to 2019, when 21 percent of cities exceeded the recommendations.

The drop in air quality occurred despite the restrictions of COVID-19, which limited travel and industrial activity, causing improvements in most locations. The fact that climate change offset this is alarming, considering the IQAir estimates that the pandemic restrictions were accompanied by a short-term reduction of 10 to 30 percent in PM2.5.

PM2.5, the type of fine particulate matter covered by the report, refers to microscopic particles that are too small to be blocked by the respiratory tract and are easily absorbed into the bloodstream as soon as they enter the lungs. Produced mainly by combustion, they are considered the most adverse to human health and are linked to a number of diseases. They have been shown to increase the risk of asthma, cancer, respiratory inflammation, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease, hospital visits and premature death.

An increase in air pollution is bad in any year. But even in parts of the country where air quality has been less affected by forest fires than by pandemic restrictions, the COVID-19 toll has traced the racial geography of air pollution.

A Harvard study published in November found that counties with historically high levels of PM2.5 also had higher COVID-19 mortality rates due to an overlap of comorbidities. The study also found that counties with PM2.5 rates greater than or equal to 8 µg / m3 have higher poverty rates, fewer hospital beds and a higher percentage of black residents.

Each year, nearly 200,000 people die in the United States from diseases related to air pollution, as defined by the EPA. (And the EPA’s air quality standards are severely deficient in the extent of their assessment.) People living in poverty, men and blacks are most at risk – and a 2017 Harvard study found that blacks are three times more likely Than the rest of the population will die due to exposure to poor air quality. The IQAir report also notes that people of color face high exposure to PM2.5, specifically, and, as has been well reported, black Americans have one of the most disproportionately adverse results if they contract COVID-19.

As coronavirus restrictions decrease, air pollution rates are likely to increase. Rates of COVID infection may also increase due to new variants of the disease. Then, the daily effects of air quality on human health during the pandemic will coincide with an increase in infections and deaths. And the mass death itself has already had an effect on air quality: in southern Caliifornian, the South Coast Air Quality Management District generally limits the number of cremations per month to restrict emissions. In January, these mandates were suspended at the request of the Los Angeles County coroner and the county’s public health department because death rates doubled and the pandemic left many bodies in the morgue.