New Research Shows Disproportionate Rate of Coronavirus Deaths in Polluted Areas
Propublica
By: Lylla Younes
The industrial plants in the riverside Louisiana city of Port Allen have worried Diana LeBlanc since her children were young. In 1978, an explosion at the nearby Placid oil refinery forced her family to evacuate.
“We had to leave in the middle of the night with two babies,” said LeBlanc, now 70. “I always had to be on the alert.”
LeBlanc worried an industrial accident would endanger her family. But she now thinks the threat was more insidious. LeBlanc, who has asthma, believes the symptoms she experienced while sick with the coronavirus were made worse by decades of breathing in toxic air pollution
“That is the one time in my life I thought, I’m not going to survive this,” she said. “I’m going to become a statistic. I was that sick.”
New research, conducted in part by ProPublica, shows she could well be right.
COVID-19 can be made more serious — and, in some cases, more deadly — by a specific type of industrial emission called hazardous air pollutants, or HAPs, according to new peer-reviewed research by ProPublica and researchers at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
The study, published Friday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found this association in both rural counties in Louisiana and highly populated communities in New York.
