Let’s say you have never smoked, never had a diagnosed lung infection but live in an urban environment where air pollution is and has been a problem for a long time. Beijing. Mumbai. The Po River Valley in Italy (e.g., Bergamo and Milan – pictured above). Mexico City. Los Angeles. And lots of other cities around the world. Scientists have drilled down to discover correlations between bad aid and the severity of COVID infections, but a most interesting study has been conducted in Bergamo, Italy, which was particularly hard hit with COVID infections and high mortality rates. The heavily industrial city of “Bergamo, also has bad air. In 2019, a test for tiny particles in Bergamo’s air averaged 18.5 micrograms per cubic meter. Los Angeles had 12.7.” Janna Brancolini writing for the March 9th Los Angeles Times. That’s pretty nasty.
Bergamo has had more than its share of cancer from toxic chemicals in the environment, but healthcare scientists wondered if COVID was materially impacted by bad air. “Now, scientists are investigating whether one long-standing health crisis has played a role in making a new one worse. Early research suggests that long-term exposure to microscopic particles abundant in Bergamo’s dirty air — and that are also in Los Angeles’ — is associated with greater risk of death from COVID-19, which is, after all, a respiratory disease.
“‘It’s possible we all have lung problems,’ said [archivist and Bergamo resident Chiara] Geroldi, whose parents both became sick with COVID-19 in the spring of 2020. ‘If [scientists] say it, I would believe it.’… The planet watched in fascinated horror as Bergamo became the first place in the developed world to be hit by the coronavirus, with the city experiencing so many deaths that processions of military trucks had to transport bodies as far away as Florence to be cremated.
“A year later, Italy’s COVID-19 fatality rate remains the fifth highest in the world, after Mexico, Peru, Hungary and South Africa, according to Johns Hopkins University. Of the country’s 100,000 deaths, almost a third were concentrated in the wealthy northern region of Lombardy.
“Researchers in Europe quickly noticed that coronavirus hot spots seemed to correspond to relatively polluted areas around the world, such as Bergamo, New York and parts of China, and began investigating. A study published in the December issue of the journal Cardiovascular Research concluded that exposure to tiny particles 2.5 micrometers or smaller, known in scientific shorthand as PM2.5 particles, was correlated with a higher percentage of avoidable deaths from COVID-19 among those who came down with the disease.
“That means that, all other things being equal — including the quality of healthcare facilities and public health measures taken to stop the virus’ spread — COVID-19 patients who live in these polluted areas are at greater risk of dying than stricken patients who breathe cleaner air.
“‘When you’re exposed to high pollution levels, your body has been under stress,’ said the study’s lead author, Andrea Pozzer, an Italian researcher with Max Planck Institute in Germany. ‘As COVID-19 takes over and causes similar illnesses as air pollution, in the end, the chances of a fatal outcome are higher.’
“His team’s findings are particularly relevant in places such as North America and Europe, where every cubic meter of air has, on average, 10 to 20 micrograms of PM2.5 particles. In that range, studies have found that each additional microgram correlates to an additional 8% risk of death for COVID-19 patients, Pozzer said.” LA Times. To make matters worse, there is even evidence that the coronavirus might actually attach to pollutant particles as a mechanism to carry the disease to more victims.
It is always a question of priorities and financial capacity. For some nations, like Brazil, Mexico and India, the depth of poverty, including the practice of clearing fields by burning, the use of burning wood or dung for cooking and to keep war, and the inability to afford pollution control systems on a widespread basis are clearly big issues. But for the United States, a very wealthy nation, the prioritization of business over health (think: “acceptable mortality rates”) allows mega-billion-dollar corporations to release effluents into the air and water without charging them for the social costs that they inflict. We have watched as billionaire-financed campaigns against environmental regulation campaigns have convinced many state legislatures and even Congress to go slow on “anti-business” regulations that purportedly “cost jobs.” Wrong! We are all paying for this inane assumption with our lives and hard cash. We should know better by now.
So, it’s OK to accelerate sickness and death – it’s just the price we have to pay to accelerate income inequality to a level not seen in the developed world in modern history? The rich get richer. And no one industrial company is going to create a disadvantage vis-à-vis its competitors by unilaterally paying for expensive pollution controls because that’s the right thing to do. Without government regulation to level the competitive playing field, it ain’t happening! Big corporations are thus able to abuse public assets – air and water – free of charge. It would be one thing if these behemoths were facing imminent bankruptcy, but in fact, their economic wealth is actually going in the other direction.
Whether you address the issue from a pollution control perspective or simply look at the global environmental decimation of accelerating climate change, you can look at these factors as either opportunities or assaults on old world industrial practices. The reality remains that tackling these issues creates vastly more jobs and economic growth than trying to preserve archaic and unsustainable business practices that wreak havoc on almost every aspect of life on this planet.
I’m Peter Dekom, and the acceleration of severe COVID infections in cities with heavy air pollution is nothing more than reminder of both our priorities and what we are doing to ourselves.
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