Covid Rehabilitation: Covid-19 & Air Pollution

NEW REPORT

Our second report of the Urban Health Council titled ‘Covid-19 & Air Pollution’ is out now for members.

INTRODUCTION

The places where we inhabit, where we work, learn, and play, have a substantial impact on our health. They can and should be the setting for a good and healthy life. Unfortunately, as we are learning from this pandemic, they are making us sick. This is not to say that habitats are inherently sick. Industry, through its actions, including consumption, traffic, construction, and extraction, is filling our habitats with environmental pollutants. Pollution, such as noise, light, and air pollution, can have detrimental effects on our bodies, making us more susceptible to disease and depriving us of the resources we need to cope with and recover from disease. The Covid-19 pandemic is a brutal reminder that we must rehabilitate our cities to places that promote the health of people and the planet.

In the context of Covid-19, air pollution (AP) presents a particularly insidious hazard given that the disease affects respiratory and cardio-vascular systems (source). These two systems are mechanically sensitive to AP meaning that AP directly damages the mechanics and as consequence the function of lungs, heart, and the circulatory system (source).

In addition, AP, indoors and outdoors, is one of the main environmental hazards identified that affects not only our lungs but, in fact, our whole body. With every breath we take, we breathe in oxygen, an element critical to our life. But we also breathe in harmful pollutants that enter our lungs and bloodstream to then travel through the whole of our system where they reach, virtually, all our cells (source). Pollutants directly damage our lungs and other organs, cause systemic inflammation (which can reduce the immune response), and initiate a stress response which, if chronic, can lead to subsequent damage to our bodies. Acute and chronic exposure to air pollution, therefore, weakens our whole system and depletes our body of resources that are essential to combat additional stressors, such as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.

There is another crucial factor to consider when it comes to the relationship between Covid-19 and AP, which is who will be affected by this relationship the most. This is crucial for recovery because those who already have experienced the worse effects of Covid-19 due to the places they live will be affected the most in the recovery process, i.e. it will take them longer to recover.

In considering who will be most affected, it is important to note the role of the lived experience in our exposure and biological response to AP. For example, a shift worker, who already has a dysregulation of their sleep/wake cycle will not only be more susceptible to AP, due to this dysregulation (source), but will also be more exposed to it through long transport times, living in environments with higher AP, or working in environments with high levels of AP. This illustrates that any research into this relationship and into solutions has to consider both a community living in a specific area and the lived experience of the individual.

This type of attention to variation and susceptibility to the relationship between Covid-19 and AP is part of an anti-racist and anti-classist approach, as it considers the habitat and the lived experience rather just the class or race a person belongs to. Notably it is structural classism and racism one should see as a risk factor, not a person’s race or class.