John Moore/Getty Images “The Bronx is the most unhealthy county in the state. And it’s not something that’s unique to Covid-19.” A worker wearing personal protective equipment pushes a Covid-19 patient from a specialized bus known as a Medical Evacuation Transport Unit, which carried patients to the Montefiore Medical Center Moses Campus on April 7 in the Bronx borough of New York City. You have to understand this is going back to issues of environmental racism. “It’s not genetics that makes us more susceptible. “Making a statement like saying the black community is at higher risk without providing context is dangerous,” she says. Lubna Ahmed, director of environmental health at New York City nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice, is blunter. “You’ll see they are inevitably intertwined with economic inequality and inequality of political power.” Chan School of Public Health who was not involved with the pre-print. “Racial inequalities have to always be put in a larger societal context,” says Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. It’s well known that minorities shoulder a larger burden of the country’s disease. Study: Small increases in air pollution make coronavirus much more deadly Latinx populations show similarly disproportionate rates: in New York City, Hispanic people represent 29 percent of the population, and 34 percent of the city’s deaths - the largest percentage by race. In Michigan, 12 percent of residents are black, but account for 32 percent of deaths. Tony Evers has called “a crisis within a crisis” - black people account for six percent of the population, and half of the Covid-19 deaths. In Louisiana, for example, black people represent 32 percent of the population and 70 percent of the Covid-19 deaths. And it could be a major factor in the disproportionate Covid-19 mortality rates we’re now seeing in non-white populations. That joins decades of scientific literature that suggest race and income impact how much chronic air pollution you are exposed to. Chan School of Public Health directly linked air pollution to the probability of more severe Covid-19 cases. On April 5, a pre-print study released by the Harvard T.H. Minority populations are bearing the brunt of this often-deadly link. And those same diseases are now associated with severe cases of Covid-19.īut they’re not distributed equally. Millions of Americans currently have conditions, like hypertension and asthma, that can be connected to air pollution. But decades of high levels of pollutants like particulate matter, ozone, and nitrogen dioxide have had a chronically negative impact on health. Air pollution is down across the United States right now as car and truck emissions plummet from mass social distancing.
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