NYT - In the Shadows of America’s Smokestacks, Virus Is One More Deadly Risk

Nationwide, low-income communities of color are exposed to significantly higher levels of pollution, studies have found, and also see higher levels of lung disease and other ailments. Now, scientists are racing to understand if long-term exposure to air pollution plays a role in the coronavirus crisis, particularly since minorities are disproportionately dying.

The science is preliminary — the virus, being so new, remains poorly understood — though researchers are finding reason to look closely. People with two conditions tied to air pollution, inflammatory lung disease and coronary heart disease, face a higher risk for severe Covid-19, preliminary research has shown. Last month, work by Harvard specialists found that coronavirus patients in areas with historically heavy air pollution are more likely to die than patients elsewhere.

And while it’s impossible to say with certainty that any one person was made more vulnerable to the virus because of pollution, earlier studies of other respiratory diseases have established that long-term exposure to air pollution increases the risk of those illness.

“The system has allowed, basically, low-income people and people of color to have to breathe the pollution,” said Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and Detroit’s former health director.

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