Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day two and
Speaker 1: twenty three since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today's
Speaker 1: main story Black people are disproportionately affected by coronavirus. One
Speaker 1: reason for that maybe that, particularly in the US, residents
Speaker 1: of black neighborhoods are statistically more likely to breathe bad air,
Speaker 1: and research is beginning to show a clear relationship between
Speaker 1: pollution and severe virus effects. But first, here's what happened
Speaker 1: in virus News today. Spain's case count could be three
Speaker 1: times higher than the official data shows. That's according to
Speaker 1: Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who said that the total number
Speaker 1: of people who have contracted coronavirus in the tree likely
Speaker 1: exceeds three million. The much steeper figure is based on
Speaker 1: scerology tests, which measure the body's response to antibodies. Today,
Speaker 1: Sanchez urged citizens to restrict movement and social contact. At
Speaker 1: the same time, he indicated that curbs would not cause
Speaker 1: unnecessary damage to the Spanish economy. All around Europe, curfews
Speaker 1: are being put in place as daily infections hit records.
Speaker 1: In France alone, cases surged by forty one thousand, six
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty two just yesterday. Against that backdrop, authorities
Speaker 1: are expanding a curfew beyond Paris and other large cities,
Speaker 1: with some additional forty six million people told to stay
Speaker 1: at home at night. French Prime Minister Geen Castex called
Speaker 1: the situation grave. Finally, the US Food and Drug Administration
Speaker 1: approved the viral therapy remdesiviere from Gilead Sciences on Thursday.
Speaker 1: Remdesviere is the first drug to obtain formal clearance for
Speaker 1: treating the coronavirus. Regulators had granted an emergency use authorization
Speaker 1: for the drug earlier this year, and since then it
Speaker 1: has become a widely used therapy in hospitalized COVID nineteen patients.
Speaker 1: It was given to President Donald Trump this month when
Speaker 1: he was diagnosed with the virus. The approval will allow
Speaker 1: Guilliad to market the drug to doctors, nurses, and patients
Speaker 1: that could help solidify its position as a go to
Speaker 1: medicine for COVID nineteen patients. And now for today's main story,
Speaker 1: one zip code in Detroit is one of the most
Speaker 1: polluted in Michigan, and it may not be a coincidence
Speaker 1: that COVID deaths and severe cases in the area are
Speaker 1: also high. Researchers have begun to confirm that pollution can
Speaker 1: worsen the effects of the illness. Black Americans have an
Speaker 1: increased vulnerability to COVID. Many explanations have been floated for
Speaker 1: that Black people are more likely to have chronic illnesses
Speaker 1: such as diabetes and high blood pressure many work and
Speaker 1: frontline jobs. But as Cynthia Coon's reports, scientists are increasingly
Speaker 1: certain that bad air plays a role in the coronavirus course.
Speaker 1: I spoke to Cynthia about the relationship between high rates
Speaker 1: of COVID nineteen among the black population and the similarly
Speaker 1: high incidents of pollution in black neighborhoods. So, Cynthia, many
Speaker 1: towns and cities across the US have been hit hard
Speaker 1: by COVID. What makes Southwest Detroit's situation slightly unusual. What's
Speaker 1: going on in Southwest Detroit is decades and decades of
Speaker 1: exposure to pollution colliding with COVID at this moment in time. So,
Speaker 1: this is a community that's surrounded by industrial polluters. There
Speaker 1: are more than a dozen of them, uh surrounding a
Speaker 1: very small area. It's just a little more than two
Speaker 1: miles long. It's a residential community that is predominantly black,
Speaker 1: and they've been living with the effects of pollution and
Speaker 1: some of the health effects from when you talk to
Speaker 1: people and you hear about their health problems and the
Speaker 1: cancers that their family of experience, or the rates of
Speaker 1: asthma within the community, it's clear that they've had that
Speaker 1: pollution has taken a toll on their quality of their
Speaker 1: health for years. And then basically we took them, We
Speaker 1: took this moment in time to look at how COVID
Speaker 1: has impacted this community. You know, in the community or
Speaker 1: next to the community. What are some of the major
Speaker 1: industries or pollutants that are causing these problems. Well, it's
Speaker 1: actually who's who of industries that are surrounding this community.
Speaker 1: There's oil refinery, a scrap yard, a gypsum plant, oil
Speaker 1: storage facilities, metal shredding, wastewater treatment plants, power stations, steel plants,
Speaker 1: asphall plants. Things as basic as the trucks that go
Speaker 1: in and out can actually spew uh find black smoke
Speaker 1: and particles that is so dense that people have told
Speaker 1: me they have to pull over sometimes to avoid these
Speaker 1: trucks that because they might not be able to even see.
Speaker 1: And these are streets where you see these industrial plants
Speaker 1: and then you look to the left and there's a house.
Speaker 1: And some of these schools have industrial plants across the
Speaker 1: street the way schools would normally have a park across
Speaker 1: the street, or you would have suspect it would be
Speaker 1: in a residential neighborhood. So it's pretty unbelievable the collision
Speaker 1: of these industrial polluters and the community how close they
Speaker 1: all live. You know, you've mentioned a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: these already, but even prior to COVID nineteen, maybe you
Speaker 1: could just sketch briefly some of these very serious health
Speaker 1: tolls as a result of living next to these heavy
Speaker 1: pollutants and industries. Yeah, I've heard about a lot of
Speaker 1: different cancers, a lot of different cancer stories, a lot
Speaker 1: of asthma issues. It's very interesting with asthma too. We
Speaker 1: took a look at the rate of hospitalization from asthma,
Speaker 1: for example, because you think of asthma's maybe you know
Speaker 1: and inhaler and needing to use it from time to time,
Speaker 1: but when you think about severe asthma and hospitalizations, people
Speaker 1: in this community are hospitalized at a much higher rate
Speaker 1: than Michigan, and I believe it was five times the
Speaker 1: rate of Americans as a whole, so severe cases of
Speaker 1: things like asthma. So it's it's really it's it's it's
Speaker 1: hard to give a whole list of health problems because
Speaker 1: there's just so many different ones that I've come up
Speaker 1: in my reporting, but it's it's really quite clear that,
Speaker 1: especially with asthma, that the hospitalization rates show that people
Speaker 1: are really struggling to breathe here during with the onset
Speaker 1: of COVID nineteen and the effects and symptoms of COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen obviously very seriously in some cases affecting the lungs,
Speaker 1: that there would be a very costly knock on effect
Speaker 1: of some of these pre existing health conditions if someone
Speaker 1: from this community were to contract COVID nineteen. I was
Speaker 1: just wondering what your research showed you about how this
Speaker 1: community was weathering COVID nineteen given these pre existing health tools.
Speaker 1: So this has been a lot through my anecdotal reporting
Speaker 1: talking to people about um the number of say family
Speaker 1: members or community members they know who have gotten sick
Speaker 1: or who have passed away from COVID. But what I
Speaker 1: found really interesting was the number of people who had
Speaker 1: these quite severe cases and that progressed to pneumonia, that
Speaker 1: progressed to requiring a ventilator. UM. I spoke to a
Speaker 1: woman months after she'd been diagnosed and hospitalized, and she
Speaker 1: was still struggling to catch her breath, and she was
Speaker 1: telling me she used to walk five miles a day
Speaker 1: and now she never plots some walk that's more than
Speaker 1: a half mile because she's quite nervous about, you know,
Speaker 1: not being able to catch her breath and being too
Speaker 1: far from home. So you can see that what's going
Speaker 1: on here from the people I've spoken to her, that
Speaker 1: some of these cases are just they're pretty severe. It's
Speaker 1: not the same story as you hear about kind of
Speaker 1: this mild illness that you you know, you can recover
Speaker 1: from in a couple of weeks. I mean, obviously, COVID
Speaker 1: is something we're still coming to an understanding about, by
Speaker 1: and large, So there's a lot for us to learn here.
Speaker 1: And this was the early days of the pandemic, so
Speaker 1: people weren't necessarily getting treatments that might be available today
Speaker 1: or even tested. I talk to people who've been turned
Speaker 1: away from the hospital. They knew they were exposed to COVID,
Speaker 1: but they're just they were they weren't being tested and
Speaker 1: there was such a shortage of everything at that point
Speaker 1: in March and April. But I think the thing is
Speaker 1: we have to we also should pay attention to the
Speaker 1: severity of COVID because this might not be a story
Speaker 1: about higher death rate. It might be a story about
Speaker 1: more severe cases, because these are people whose lungs may
Speaker 1: be compromised from decades of breathing bad air. And so
Speaker 1: that it's a line of research that I think scientists
Speaker 1: need to explore. And um, you know, there's a small
Speaker 1: group of scientists doing the work. There is some research emerging,
Speaker 1: and that's really exciting. But I think there's a lot
Speaker 1: more to go here, because this isn't just a story
Speaker 1: about Southwest Detroit. There are plenty of parts of the
Speaker 1: US and the rest of the world that have this
Speaker 1: that their reality is that there people are exposed to
Speaker 1: disproportionate amounts of pollution and and I'd love to dig
Speaker 1: further on that of where elsewhere has there been any
Speaker 1: research done or any link found between say, the presence
Speaker 1: of heavy industry and these higher or more serious cases
Speaker 1: of COVID nineteen apart from southwest Detroit. So one interesting
Speaker 1: study out of Europe took a look. This scientist um
Speaker 1: A research scientists took a look. He guys are thinking
Speaker 1: about what different areas that were hard hit by COVID
Speaker 1: in the beginning had in common. His research showed that
Speaker 1: seventy of the deaths and he picked France, Germany, Italy,
Speaker 1: and Spain were in the more polluted parts of this
Speaker 1: country and so and one point five percent of the
Speaker 1: deaths were in the least polluted parts. So he took
Speaker 1: Europe and said, look, the least polluted parts were also
Speaker 1: where people fared better with COVID, using death number of
Speaker 1: deaths as this way of measuring that. Another researcher did
Speaker 1: work out of Harvard looking at long term exposure to
Speaker 1: pollution and what she showed was that even modest increases
Speaker 1: lead to large increases in the death rate. So that
Speaker 1: was interesting just linking together this idea that even having
Speaker 1: a little more pollution exposure or modest amount more does
Speaker 1: have a bigger implication for mortality. So those are some
Speaker 1: studies early on, but there's there's a bit of work
Speaker 1: going on right now. These were the very early research
Speaker 1: projects that were getting done and published or these these
Speaker 1: researchers were putting them out very early on and they
Speaker 1: kind of created a stir and as especially the Harvard study,
Speaker 1: they published it without before doing peer review, and her
Speaker 1: thinking was, let me get this out into the world.
Speaker 1: This is really important, and so it was interesting to
Speaker 1: see the way the world reacted. I think there was
Speaker 1: some positive momentum from that. She was invited to speak
Speaker 1: to Congress and she did an event with Corey Booker
Speaker 1: and a minister from Cancer ALI in Louisiana to talk
Speaker 1: about these issues. So she got some quite a bit
Speaker 1: of kind of attention for it, but she said she
Speaker 1: also faced some people who you know, had points of
Speaker 1: view on this, and so that's part of the process.
Speaker 1: And so, I it's interesting to see but this research,
Speaker 1: these researchers put this research out quite early because they
Speaker 1: really wanted this message to get out into the world.
Speaker 1: And finally zooming back to Southwest Detroit, you mentioned that
Speaker 1: it was a predominantly black community, and research has shown
Speaker 1: throughout this pandemic that many racialized communities, particularly black communities,
Speaker 1: have suffered higher case rates more serious complications from COVID
Speaker 1: ninth teen. How do you think this factors into what
Speaker 1: you saw in Southwest Detroit? What what is that role there?
Speaker 1: You're taking a community that's already dealing with a disproportionate
Speaker 1: amount of pollution, a predominantly black community, and continuing to
Speaker 1: pile on potential more sources of pollution. I mean, this
Speaker 1: community also came to be partly due to the way
Speaker 1: redlining laid out The city of Detroit and where black
Speaker 1: people ended up living is much older history, but it's
Speaker 1: still plays into some of the ways that this community
Speaker 1: was formed. And then the things that started to happen
Speaker 1: with industry. Industry has been there for a long time,
Speaker 1: but continuing to pollute and pulling it off. I think
Speaker 1: some of these lawsuits are really challenging that having happened
Speaker 1: just by accident and maybe being part of this whole
Speaker 1: systemic racism story that is, you know, really coming to
Speaker 1: the forefront in America this year with the Black Lives
Speaker 1: Movement that we need to really consider the way our
Speaker 1: institutions are continuing to disadvantage people of color in this
Speaker 1: country in very subtle and overt ways. That was Cynthia
Speaker 1: Coons and that's it for our show today. For coverage
Speaker 1: of the outbreak from one D and twenty beraus around
Speaker 1: the world. Visit bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if
Speaker 1: you like the show, please leave us a review and
Speaker 1: a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best
Speaker 1: way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The
Speaker 1: Prognosis Alia edition is produced by Tophor foreheads Jordan Gospore,
Speaker 1: Magnus Henrickson, and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was
Speaker 1: reported by Cynthia Coon's original music by Leo Sidrin. Our
Speaker 1: editors are Rick Shine and Francesca Levi. Francesca Levi is
Speaker 1: Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening, Land and