Reduction in air pollution helps COVID-19 victims
Vehicle traffic is down 47 per cent within Vancouver’s city limits and down 55 per cent in the downtown core since non-essential businesses were shut down to control the spread of COVID-19, according to city hall.
That likely comes as a relief to commuters who usually have to battle the third-worst traffic congestion of any city in North America, behind only Mexico City and Los Angeles, according to a global ranking of 416 cities by TomTom.
TransLink vehicle counts on the Golden Ears, Pattullo and Knight Street bridges suggest that commuter traffic is down by 30 to nearly 40 per cent.
In Metro Vancouver, closing businesses and letting office workers do their jobs from home appears to have a measurable impact on levels of nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter, called PM2.5. It may also save lives. These common pollutants have a harmful effect on lung function and immunity, which makes reducing those levels key to saving the lives of people who contract COVID-19.
“COVID-19 is a respiratory infection and we know that respiratory infections are made worse by air pollution,” said Michael Brauer, a professor at UBC’s School of Population and Public Health.
While it’s too early to know what impact air pollution had on mortality rates from COVID -19 in China, studies from the SARS outbreak that started in 2002 noted a dramatic impact.
“The basic conclusion was that on days with the worst air pollution, the risk of dying from SARS doubled,” he said. “It’s what we would expect from human physiology and we see the same thing with the flu and pneumonia.”
Those health impacts are felt even in Canadian cities where pollution levels are relatively low compared to major cities in China. And that may be especially true in areas where people heat their homes with wood.
A pair of studies supervised by Brauer found that nitrogen oxide and nitrogen dioxide from busy traffic corridors and winter wood burning were associated with higher rates of lung infection and middle ear infection in children.
The Border Air Quality Study, backed by Health Canada and B.C. Centre for Disease Control, found that traffic-related pollution and wood burning in Metro Vancouver cause higher rates of bronchiolitis and childhood asthma.
Living near a traffic corridor is also associated with pre-term and low birth-weight babies and is “directly related” to death from coronary heart disease in adults. About 1,600 British Columbians die each year from pollution-related illness, according to Health Canada.
COVID-19 is especially dangerous to people with existing health conditions such as heart and lung disease and asthma, according to the BCCDC.
Brauer is advocating for a ban on wood burning in home fireplaces where it is not needed as a primary heating source and on open burning in populated regions by the agriculture and forestry sectors.
“We know that air pollution makes these infections worse, so if we are going to all this trouble to keep people healthy and out of the hospital, here’s another thing we can do,” he said.
On the advice of the BCCDC, the provincial government and the Metro Vancouver regional government have taken action to curtail open wood waste fires.