By Susan Nerlinger, Transportation Committee, Maryland Sierra Club
Research shows a correlation between air pollution and worse outcomes for Covid-19 patients.
Recent research correlating some of the worst outcomes from Covid-19 to long-term exposure to air pollution should motivate us to fight the Trump administration’s efforts to weaken protections against damaging emissions. The breath of fresh, clean air we’ve all experienced is the benefit of automobile traffic greatly reduced because more people are working remotely. It demonstrates what a powerful solution telework could offer to the air pollution and climate change crises. We do not need expanded interstate highways and luxury toll lanes if we can hold on to the changes that stay-at-home orders have effected.
Researchers at the Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health have taken the first steps in showing that long-term exposure to air pollution is associated with an increased incidence of more serious illness and death in Covid-19 patients.
Dangerous, microscopically small particles in the air known as PM 2.5 come from fuel combustion in autos, oil refineries, and power plants. Breathing in these tiny pollutants inflames and damages the lining of the lungs and over time weakens the body’s ability to fight off respiratory infections. Many studies have found that exposure to this particulate pollution increases the risk for lung cancer, heart attacks, stroke, premature death and a range of other negative health effects. About one in six Americans, almost 50 million people, live in areas with too many days of unhealthy levels of particle pollution. A study that included the entire population of Medicare recipients from 2001 to 2012 showed a significant increase risk of death from all causes associated with short-term exposure to PM2.5 and ozone.
Now researchers have associated long-term exposure to this type of pollution to some of the worst outcomes for Covid-19 patients. Research reported in The New York Times on April 7, 2020 (updated on 4/17/20) confirmed that just a slight increase in long-term air pollution exposure can have significant consequences for Covid-19 patients, even controlling for other factors such as smoking and population density.
A person who has lived for decades in a county with high levels of fine particulate matter is 15% more likely to die from Covid-19 infection than a person in a region with as little as 1 unit less of fine particulate pollution. Research from SARS in China had shown the same correlation between exposure to air pollution and an increase in deaths from SARS.
Italian researchers have raised the possibility that particulate air pollution may actually spread the coronavirus. As reported at The Guardian website, a team led by Leonardo Setti at the University of Bologna collected outdoor air pollution samples at one urban and one industrial site in the province of Bergamo in Italy. Bergamo has experienced especially high rates of Covid-19 infection and is also one of the most polluted regions in Europe. The team identified a gene highly specific to Covid-19 in multiple samples of particulate air pollution, which raises the possibility that air pollution might be able to spread the virus.
These findings add urgency to the need to maintain the lower levels of air pollution that have resulted from stay-at-home orders. In Maryland, citizens have experienced significantly improved air quality as the density of traffic has been greatly reduced. Millions of people are not driving to their work places every day. Continuing remote work on the scale it has been practiced during the era of stay-at-home orders would reduce the injury to human and environmental health as well as promoting better outcomes for those infected with Covid-19.
Maintaining remote work and telework into the future could also resolve the conflict over expansion of interstates 495 and 270. If employers whose workers are now laboring remotely and teleworking would simply maintain these practices, Maryland would not have to invest billions in the 495/270 project, because the traffic congestion that justifies it would no longer exist.
Meanwhile the Trump administration is taking steps to make air pollution worse. Just last week it publicized its plan to weaken regulations on auto tailpipe emissions even after its own analysis found that there would be more premature deaths from increased air pollution. Two weeks ago the EPA weakened a regulation on carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants even while admitting that this action would lead to 1400 more premature deaths a year from increased pollution. All the evidence compels the conclusion that the U.S. needs to strengthen regulations aimed at limiting air pollution, but the Trump EPA is moving in the opposite direction.
Given the possible link between particulate air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels and worse outcomes for Covid-19 sufferers, it is more urgent than ever that we combat the weakening of regulations designed to reduce air pollution. And we should redouble our efforts to promote the wide-spread adoption of remote work; the current crisis has amply demonstrated that it can bring us much closer to our desired goal of cleaner, healthier air.