Air pollution could make the COVID-19 pandemic worse for some people

Juliana Pino usually fights to push polluters out of the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago, an industrial area with a big Latino community. Now, amid the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic, she and her colleagues are also checking in on their elderly neighbors, pooling money together for groceries to help those who can’t afford them, and translating health information on the novel coronavirus for Spanish-speaking residents. The work is different, but it’s still connected to her fight for clean air. The older people who live in Little Village are already more vulnerable to COVID-19 because of their age.

But the ones who grew up here also spent most of their lives breathing in air laden with the soot from nearby coal power plants, she explains. “You have a legacy of toxic exposure paired with a lot of social vulnerability, that means that the same pound of pollution impacts different people differently,” says Pino, a policy director for the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, which successfully campaigned to close the coal power plants in 2012. The novel coronavirus is changing nearly every aspect of life in places with an outbreak. Like any disaster, the COVID-19 pandemic will hit some people harder than others.

Since it’s a disease that affects the lungs, people who live in places with way more air pollution could be more vulnerable. This pollution tends to be worse in communities with more poverty, people of color, and immigrants. When it comes to the US, “We’re the richest country in the world yet we have some of the greatest inequities. These inequities have real consequences and COVID-19 will show that,” John Balmes, a physician and a spokesperson for the American Lung Association, tells The Verge.

“The air pollution interacts with multiple other factors that increase risk,” he says. 4. It is directly related to our fight for clean air, clean water, a healthy environment, and healthy communities. #COVID19 is affecting all of us—our health and our way of life, but low-income communities and communities of color may face added risk.

Severe cases of COVID-19 can lead to pneumonia, which can kill. The disease is deadliest in older people and those with preexisting health conditions that make it harder to breathe or fight off the infection. Even without a pandemic, living with air pollution has been linked to higher rates of lung disease like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in populations.