The Dangers of Pollution in a Pandemic

in virus News today. Spain's case count could be three times higher than the official data shows. That's according to Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who said that the total number of people who have contracted coronavirus in the tree likely exceeds three million. The much steeper figure is based on scerology tests, which measure the body's response to antibodies. Today, Sanchez urged citizens to restrict movement and social contact. At the same time, he indicated that curbs would not cause

unnecessary damage to the Spanish economy. All around Europe, curfews are being put in place as daily infections hit records. In France alone, cases surged by forty one thousand, six hundred and twenty two just yesterday. Against that backdrop, authorities are expanding a curfew beyond Paris and other large cities, with some additional forty six million people told to stay at home at night. French Prime Minister Geen Castex called

the situation grave. Finally, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the viral therapy remdesiviere from Gilead Sciences on Thursday. Remdesviere is the first drug to obtain formal clearance for treating the coronavirus. Regulators had granted an emergency use authorization for the drug earlier this year, and since then it has become a widely used therapy in hospitalized COVID nineteen patients. It was given to President Donald Trump this month when

he was diagnosed with the virus. The approval will allow Guilliad to market the drug to doctors, nurses, and patients that could help solidify its position as a go to medicine for COVID nineteen patients. And now for today's main story, one zip code in Detroit is one of the most polluted in Michigan, and it may not be a coincidence that COVID deaths and severe cases in the area are also high. Researchers have begun to confirm that pollution can

worsen the effects of the illness. Black Americans have an increased vulnerability to COVID. Many explanations have been floated for that Black people are more likely to have chronic illnesses such as diabetes and high blood pressure many work and frontline jobs. But as Cynthia Coon's reports, scientists are increasingly certain that bad air plays a role in the coronavirus course.

I spoke to Cynthia about the relationship between high rates of COVID nineteen among the black population and the similarly high incidents of pollution in black neighborhoods. So, Cynthia, many towns and cities across the US have been hit hard by COVID. What makes Southwest Detroit's situation slightly unusual. What's going on in Southwest Detroit is decades and decades of exposure to pollution colliding with COVID at this moment in time. So,

this is a community that's surrounded by industrial polluters. There are more than a dozen of them, uh surrounding a very small area. It's just a little more than two

miles long. It's a residential community that is predominantly black, and they've been living with the effects of pollution and some of the health effects from when you talk to people and you hear about their health problems and the cancers that their family of experience, or the rates of asthma within the community, it's clear that they've had that pollution has taken a toll on their quality of their

health for years. And then basically we took them, We took this moment in time to look at how COVID has impacted this community. You know, in the community or next to the community. What are some of the major industries or pollutants that are causing these problems. Well, it's actually who's who of industries that are surrounding this community. There's oil refinery, a scrap yard, a gypsum plant, oil storage facilities, metal shredding, wastewater treatment plants, power stations, steel plants,

asphall plants. Things as basic as the trucks that go in and out can actually spew uh find black smoke and particles that is so dense that people have told me they have to pull over sometimes to avoid these trucks that because they might not be able to even see. And these are streets where you see these industrial plants and then you look to the left and there's a house.

And some of these schools have industrial plants across the street the way schools would normally have a park across the street, or you would have suspect it would be in a residential neighborhood. So it's pretty unbelievable the collision of these industrial polluters and the community how close they

all live. You know, you've mentioned a whole bunch of these already, but even prior to COVID nineteen, maybe you could just sketch briefly some of these very serious health tolls as a result of living next to these heavy pollutants and industries. Yeah, I've heard about a lot of different cancers, a lot of different cancer stories, a lot

of asthma issues. It's very interesting with asthma too. We took a look at the rate of hospitalization from asthma, for example, because you think of asthma's maybe you know and inhaler and needing to use it from time to time, but when you think about severe asthma and hospitalizations, people in this community are hospitalized at a much higher rate than Michigan, and I believe it was five times the rate of Americans as a whole, so severe cases of

things like asthma. So it's it's really it's it's it's hard to give a whole list of health problems because there's just so many different ones that I've come up in my reporting, but it's it's really quite clear that, especially with asthma, that the hospitalization rates show that people are really struggling to breathe here during with the onset of COVID nineteen and the effects and symptoms of COVID nineteen obviously very seriously in some cases affecting the lungs,

that there would be a very costly knock on effect of some of these pre existing health conditions if someone from this community were to contract COVID nineteen. I was just wondering what your research showed you about how this community was weathering COVID nineteen given these pre existing health tools. So this has been a lot through my anecdotal reporting talking to people about um the number of say family members or community members they know who have gotten sick

or who have passed away from COVID. But what I found really interesting was the number of people who had these quite severe cases and that progressed to pneumonia, that

progressed to requiring a ventilator. UM. I spoke to a woman months after she'd been diagnosed and hospitalized, and she was still struggling to catch her breath, and she was telling me she used to walk five miles a day and now she never plots some walk that's more than a half mile because she's quite nervous about, you know, not being able to catch her breath and being too far from home. So you can see that what's going on here from the people I've spoken to her, that

some of these cases are just they're pretty severe. It's not the same story as you hear about kind of this mild illness that you you know, you can recover from in a couple of weeks. I mean, obviously, COVID is something we're still coming to an understanding about, by and large, So there's a lot for us to learn here. And this was the early days of the pandemic, so people weren't necessarily getting treatments that might be available today or even tested. I talk to people who've been turned

away from the hospital. They knew they were exposed to COVID, but they're just they were they weren't being tested and there was such a shortage of everything at that point in March and April. But I think the thing is we have to we also should pay attention to the severity of COVID because this might not be a story about higher death rate. It might be a story about more severe cases, because these are people whose lungs may

be compromised from decades of breathing bad air. And so that it's a line of research that I think scientists need to explore. And um, you know, there's a small group of scientists doing the work. There is some research emerging, and that's really exciting. But I think there's a lot more to go here, because this isn't just a story

about Southwest Detroit. There are plenty of parts of the US and the rest of the world that have this that their reality is that there people are exposed to disproportionate amounts of pollution and and I'd love to dig further on that of where elsewhere has there been any research done or any link found between say, the presence of heavy industry and these higher or more serious cases of COVID nineteen apart from southwest Detroit. So one interesting

study out of Europe took a look. This scientist um A research scientists took a look. He guys are thinking about what different areas that were hard hit by COVID in the beginning had in common. His research showed that seventy of the deaths and he picked France, Germany, Italy, and Spain were in the more polluted parts of this country and so and one point five percent of the

deaths were in the least polluted parts. So he took Europe and said, look, the least polluted parts were also where people fared better with COVID, using death number of deaths as this way of measuring that. Another researcher did work out of Harvard looking at long term exposure to pollution and what she showed was that even modest increases

lead to large increases in the death rate. So that was interesting just linking together this idea that even having a little more pollution exposure or modest amount more does have a bigger implication for mortality. So those are some studies early on, but there's there's a bit of work

going on right now. These were the very early research projects that were getting done and published or these these researchers were putting them out very early on and they kind of created a stir and as especially the Harvard study, they published it without before doing peer review, and her thinking was, let me get this out into the world. This is really important, and so it was interesting to see the way the world reacted. I think there was

some positive momentum from that. She was invited to speak to Congress and she did an event with Corey Booker and a minister from Cancer ALI in Louisiana to talk about these issues. So she got some quite a bit of kind of attention for it, but she said she also faced some people who you know, had points of view on this, and so that's part of the process.

And so, I it's interesting to see but this research, these researchers put this research out quite early because they really wanted this message to get out into the world. And finally zooming back to Southwest Detroit, you mentioned that it was a predominantly black community, and research has shown throughout this pandemic that many racialized communities, particularly black communities, have suffered higher case rates more serious complications from COVID

ninth teen. How do you think this factors into what you saw in Southwest Detroit? What what is that role there? You're taking a community that's already dealing with a disproportionate amount of pollution, a predominantly black community, and continuing to

pile on potential more sources of pollution. I mean, this community also came to be partly due to the way redlining laid out The city of Detroit and where black people ended up living is much older history, but it's still plays into some of the ways that this community was formed. And then the things that started to happen with industry. Industry has been there for a long time,

but continuing to pollute and pulling it off. I think some of these lawsuits are really challenging that having happened just by accident and maybe being part of this whole systemic racism story that is, you know, really coming to the forefront in America this year with the Black Lives Movement that we need to really consider the way our institutions are continuing to disadvantage people of color in this country in very subtle and overt ways. That was Cynthia

Coons and that's it for our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one D and twenty beraus around the world. Visit bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Alia edition is produced by Tophor foreheads Jordan Gospore, Magnus Henrickson, and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was

reported by Cynthia Coon's original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesca Levi. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening, Land and