During the peak of the coVID-19 closure this spring and summer, when Sabrina Hall left her home in the Bayview-Hunters Point community in San Francisco and drove to her car, she discovered that the vehicle, and all other cars in the community, were covered. in a thin layer of dust.
Its origin, he believes, is a concrete residue of the nearby road structure that “lasted all the time” of the pandemic, he said, and with an intensity higher than before the order to remain in the house in March. Lately, along with the wind and ashes of wildfires, “the dust scene has been worse,” he said Thursday.
Leaotis Martin didn’t have to leave the space to breathe invasive particles. On June 8, the personnel and heavy appliances of space builder Lennar Corp. they gave the impression in the south aspect of Hunters Point Ridge to resume paintings on the megadevelopment of the SF shipyard, the city’s greatest genuine ownership effort since the 1906 earthquake. Since then, “we’ve been dusted everywhere, from where I am,” a few blocks down West Point Road, Martin said in an interview this summer.
While life in San Francisco has entered a state of suspended animation at the start of the new coronavirus pandemic, some cases have continued as usual. This includes construction, which after the first two weeks of closure, in particular legal as an “essential activity” according to the Decree of Mayor London Breed, provided that it met certain criteria.
The limits of the structure’s activity were lifted on May 17 as California reopened. The reopening foreshadowed a peak in the summer in the COVID-19 instances. As the pandemic continues during the wildfire season and the citizens of San Francisco breathe pollutants caused through multi-kilometre wide smoke blankets, public fitness experts and researchers contacted for this article agree that man-made pollutant resources deserve to be limited or eliminated.
This would come with limits on the structure. Scientists agree that the structure contributes to air pollutants and, according to several studies, air pollutants can wait where the disease will hit harder and worsen symptoms once others get sick. And early studies in Italy, where the pandemic hit hard in its early stages, suggest that pollutants can transmit the virus itself.
In addition to on-site shelter, mandatory masking and hand washing, a practical and comprehensive public aptitude reaction to the new coronavirus pandemic would come with mandates for cleaner air, experts say. This would be welcome in Bayview. The region suffers from one of the worst air grades in the region, as well as COVID-19 rates in San Francisco, with 1,101 cases shown among 37,394 residents, according to the San Francisco Department of Public Health.
Despite the highest likelihood that pollutant controls will affect the results, the coronavirus pandemic has not caused any adjustment to air pollutant restrictions in the Bay Area, officials from the San Francisco Department of Public Health and the Bay Area Air Quality District confirmed. This reluctance leads experts to question the movements of decision-makers.
“I don’t know why structure is considered an essential activity,” said Dr. John Balmes, an epidemiologist and air quality expert at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. “I think it’s a political and economic decision.”
The result for some San Francisco residents, such as Martin and Hall, is to take refuge in what they say and what knowledge recommends is a bad environment that can make them more vulnerable to the virus.
In Italy and China, the first two COVID-19 hot spots, researchers have discovered what they call a “direct relationship” between debris and virus cases. Based on these findings, an article published in April in the peer-reviewed Journal Challenges warned that the new coronavirus may, in the rubble, be thin debris small enough to be inhaled and housed in the lungs, and that this was a transparent call to regulators. decrease pollutants in reaction to a pandemic.
“While it is true that the new coronavirus remains active for a few hours to several days on surfaces, it makes sense to postulate that the same can occur when it is adsorbed or absorbed through atmospheric particles, which can also help send the virus. human respiratory system,” wrote lead researcher Luigi Sanita di Toppi, a biologist at the University of Pisa.
Once inhaled, these wastes, loaded or virused, can cause lung inflammation.
Common resources for particulate emissions come from industry and automobile carbon emissions, smoke and wood dust from the structure and other structure activities, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
It is well known that these contaminants increase the likelihood of respiratory infections and mortality. And the links between structural pollutants and lung disease were cautioned long before the pandemic.
“While the Earth is paying a very high bill for us, governments and other governments will have to take swift action to offset higher pollutant levels,” says di Toppi.
Bayview Hunters Point has already paid a very high bill. According to a survey of elementary school academics at George Washington Carver Elementary School near the Hunters Point shipyard, up to 85% of freshmen have symptoms of asthma, a crisis of public fitness that researchers say is related to an influx. new construction.
“Given this, there are reasons for public fitness to institute stricter pollutant controls now,” said Dr. Claudia Persico, a researcher and professor implemented at the American University of Washington, D.C.
Persico is the leader of a recent discussion paper that suggests a link between air pollutants and COVID-19 infections and deaths. Harvard University researchers, T.H. The Chan School of Public Health discovered a similar link between long-term exposure to air pollutants and higher mortality rates from COVID-19.
The pandemic adds an emergency layer to the community’s revived considerations around the Bayview-Hunters Point shipyard redevelopment project. In 2008, Lennar Corp. he paid a $515,000 fine for not having structured the dust loaded with herbal serpentine asbestos at Hunters Point Hill, where the first condominium loads were built.
More recently, the shipyard’s allocation was delayed for years by a fraud scandal in which a contractor hired to mask contaminants allegedly simulated his paints. The weight of these developments, as well as recent studies suggesting that the shipyard’s poisonous fabrics may have been absorbed by local citizens and painters, and fears that the paintings that began in June no longer lifted asbestos-laden dust, have led to new calls for government intervention.
“Once again, Lennar Corporation declares loudly and transparently that black people’s lives do matter,” attorney Charles Bonner wrote in a petition filed in early July with the state attorney general’s office. Bonner alleged that the dust from the structure enters near the houses and asked the government to avoid the structure, a repeated claim through Martin and other litigants in an action of elegance.
Officials from the Bay Region Air Quality Management District were under pressure that the allocation of Lennar’s structure did not violate any contaminant limits, and added controls on dust containing naturally taxed serpentine asbestos more than a decade ago. A district inspector edited the site on July 1 and did not perform any transmission, according to a site report received through a public records request.
Danielle Tocco, Lennar’s spokesman, did not respond to several emails and phone call comments.
And, at least for now, this painting is made. Lennar’s paintings in June are pre-structure paintings called “essouchement”, roots and hillside plants so that a heavier structure can begin.
Once the structure begins, particulate emissions will continue to be monitored, district spokesman Ralph Borrmann said in an email. Emissions will be subject to the limits set out in the agreement reached a decade ago.
But simple dust tracking is not enough for some public fitness experts. Some that pollutants control in their position before the pandemic are too lax, and that the degrees of contaminants allowed contribute to asthma, chronic bronchitis and other lung diseases that make others with the disease more likely to become seriously ill with COVID-19.
“Overall, the criteria for reducing air pollutants should be stricter, regardless of COVID,” said Dr. Mary Prunicki, a ph.d. and student at Stanford University School of Medicine, where she is director of air pollutants and fitness studies at the Sean N Center. Parker for allergy research.
Even spaces with poor physical condition and generalized chronic respiratory disorders related to long-term air pollutants delight in near-immediate innovations when pollutant levels are reduced, he said. Pollution disorders highlight past court cases of the pandemic that there is little justification for thinking of structure as an “essential activity” in a respiratory disease pandemic.
“There is a difference of opinion, but on the basis of science, I would say that it deserves to be limited or stopped,” Prunicki said. “Needless to say, if you can improve air quality, or at least not worsen it, it can have an effect on COVID levels.”
As in other parts of the country, air quality took a step forward, particularly in March and April, when all staff were asked, a must-have staff, to stay in their homes and traffic disappeared from Bay Area roads. Since then, pollutant levels have slowly returned to general, before degenerating into one of the world’s most damaging air quality levels after last week’s wildfires.
With this in mind, and with the pandemic still suffocating the economy and activities in general, more radical measures would possibly be needed to control the virus.
“Given the existing accumulation of coronavirus infections, we deserve a much larger lockdown and shelter in the place, and in my opinion, this would include “limits to activities that emit debris like construction,” said UCSF’s Balmes.
The construction also poses hazards for staff working in a dusty environment. Inhalation of dust can weaken your immune system, increasing the likelihood of getting COVID-19, which can then spread to the circle of family or friends at home.
To date, the coronavirus pandemic does not even appear to have provoked a debate about restricting polluting activities or re-examination of the prestige of the residential structure at market rates. In fact, elected officials contacted for this article refused to even talk about the concept.
Prior to the election of District 10 Supervisor, Shamann Walton, to form Bayview two years ago, was EXECUTIVE Director of Young Community Developers, a nonprofit vocational education organization that also cares about the structure of affordable housing.
“Right now, we’re dealing with the negative effects of COVID-19,” he wrote in reaction to a text message asking if he could meet the challenge of air pollution. “We provide food, fundamental needs, PPE and financial resources.”
When asked directly if he would do stricter contaminant controls, Walton, who is also on the district’s air quality board, did not respond.
The mayor of London Breed, through the city’s spokesman, Joseph Sweiss, declared “the date between poor air quality and COVID-19.” When asked about the link between Bayview’s poor air quality and its COVID levels, and what can be done in response, Sweiss said the pandemic had “disproportionately impacted the most vulnerable among us.”
Part of San Francisco’s climate action plan to become a zero-emissions city until 2050 includes an existing law that would impose “zero-emission homes” by banning herbal fuel heaters and stoves in the new structure, he said. When asked why the structure was thought to be an “essential activity” of the pandemic and if Breed would review the designation or impose stricter contaminant controls, Sweiss did not respond at the time of publication.
Pollution can provide public servants with a full menu of bad options, much like reopening schools.
Keep the limits of contaminants where they are and health hazards are exacerbated. Reducing pollutant limits and commercial and structural work can disappear. The improved air quality observed in the Bay Area this spring “has been accompanied by devastating social and economic demand situations that will continue to affect communities, especially the most vulnerable and vulnerable, for the foreseeable future,” Dr. Sumi said. Mehta, senior epidemiologist at Vital Strategies, a global public fitness organization that advises governments.
Such considerations will satisfy some critics, for whom the COVID-19 pandemic represents a crisis in addition to a crisis, and for whom public aptitude considerations outperform economic indicators.
“I don’t think we’ll talk about it anymore,” said Dr. Mark Alexander, a retired Kaiser Permanente epidemiologist and researcher in Northern California, who grew up in Bayview and now works as an advocate and adviser to fitness equity.
“I would say that the 38,000 citizens of Bayview-Hunters Point gain advantages and will gain advantages particularly from the ongoing progression at Bayview-Hunters Point,” he said. “This work, and the lack of interest in community fitness, took position long before it hit the pandemic.
“Development will have to stop, in fact in this era of the COVID-19 pandemic,” he added. “It would be the most human thing to do at the very least.”
Until then, citizens like Hall and Martin have been through public fitness officials to stay at home to prevent the spread of the virus, in an environment that experts say is bad and worsens as wildfires increase.
Hall suffers from lung disease and is involved in damage caused by structure dust and other elective paints. While the city insists that the paintings continue, there are preventive measures that can justify or save lives that have simply not been proposed.
“They didn’t offer us humidifiers or air purifiers,” he said. “There is no dust or fear for our health.”
Chris Roberts recently edited SF Weekly, where he covered San Francisco (politics, police, people) and hashish in California since 2009.
Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom says what used to be a necessity. “Before COVID, about 5% of race days were spent at home and this was done in about 15% of Americans, with an average of one day in three.
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