Smoke from California and Oregon wildfires this week cloaked Canada’s third-largest city of Vancouver — known for its majestic mountain views and fresh ocean breezes — in the dirtiest air in the world.
Days have been spent smarting under a thick haze that has irritated eyes and throats, and sent asthmatics gasping for breath. It has also complicated COVID-19 testing.
On Friday, despite forecasted smoke-clearing rain storms, the city — 1,300km north of the biggest California fires — topped for the second time this week the World Air Quality Index for worst air, after briefly ceding first place to Portland in fire-stricken Oregon.
Photo: AFP
“I’m out of breath all the time, my chest feels like it’s exploding, I feel like I’m going to suffocate,” said Fatima Jaffer, a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia.
“I’m afraid of the long-term damage this smoke might do to my lungs and my asthma,” she added.
Authorities for the metropolitan region of 2.5 million residents have issued daily air quality warnings since Tuesday last week, with things so bad that Vancouver opened five filtered “clean air shelters.”
It is equivalent to smoking eight cigarettes a day, researchers said.
Health officials urged people to close windows and avoid strenuous exercise or outdoor activities — especially those with respiratory illness.
Jaffer, 58, said her worsening asthma added to a sense of panic and dread, as she had just recovered from COVID-19, which robbed her of her sense of smell.
She worries the smog could increase her odds of reinfection or cause new health complications.
“I’d just gotten to the place of getting over the fear of COVID-19 and felt like I could breathe again, and now I literally can’t,” she said.
It has been an “entire horrible week for air quality,” said Armel Castellan, a federal warning preparedness meteorologist. “The fine particulate has brought our Air Quality Health Index up off the charts.”
“There’s no doubt this is very massive and very concerning,” he said.
The same people are at most risk of smoke inhalation and the coronavirus, said Bonnie Henry, British Columbia’s provincial health officer.
The past month has seen British Columbia’s active COVID-19 cases surge 130 percent, hitting highs more than double those at the pandemic’s April peak.
“For many of us, there’s confusion about what symptoms are caused by smoky skies, and what symptoms are caused by COVID-19,” Henry told a news conference, “particularly for people who have underlying lung disease, asthma, heart disease and diabetes.”
Another vulnerable group is Vancouver’s more than 2,000 homeless residents, many of whom have chronic illness, a survey showed.
“If you’re outside and homeless, and surrounded by this smoke and the pandemic, you can’t get away from any of these things,” Union Gospel Mission communications manager Jeremy Hunka said. “It’s hitting a group of people that generally have been just left far more vulnerable.”
LIFE GOES ON: After a strict lockdown that left millions on the brink of starvation, Indians embrace work to avoid starvation and get ready for several major festivals India is on course to top the world in COVID-19 cases, but from Maharashtra’s whirring factories to Kolkata’s thronging markets, people are back at work — and eager to forget the pandemic for festival season. After a strict lockdown in March that left millions on the brink of starvation, the government and people of the world’s second-most populous country decided life must go on. Sonali Dange, for instance, has two young daughters and an elderly mother-in-law to look after. She was hospitalized this year in excruciating pain after catching the novel coronavirus. However, after the lockdown exhausted the family’s savings, the 29-year-old had
A COVID-19 outbreak among hundreds of Russian and Ukrainian fishers flown to New Zealand to bolster its struggling deep-sea fishing industry has prompted that country’s largest daily increase in infections in months, authorities said yesterday. More than 230 fishers were flown in from Moscow last week, with 18 of the crew members then testing positive for COVID-19 while in quarantine, New Zealand Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said. The Pacific nation has almost eliminated local transmission of the virus, but regularly records small numbers of new cases in returned travelers. The fishing cluster pushed the daily tally of new infections to 25,
From monitoring vital signs to filtering filthy air and even translating speech into other languages, the COVID-19-fueled boom in mask-wearing has spawned an unusual range of high-tech face coverings. As masks become the norm worldwide, tech companies and researchers are rolling out weird and wonderful models to guard against infection and cash in on a growing trend. One of the wackiest comes from Japan, where start-up Donut Robotics has created a face covering that helps users adhere to social distancing and also acts as a translator. The “C-Face” mask works by transmitting a wearer’s speech to a smartphone via an app, and allows
JAPAN Deer-edible bags invented The deer that roam Nara no longer face discomfort — or far worse — after local firms developed a safe alternative to the plastic packaging discarded by tourists that often ended up in the animals’ stomachs. Last year, several of the 1,300 deer that wander around the ancient capital’s central park were found dead after swallowing plastic bags and food wrappers. Firms collaborated to develop bags that pass safely through the animals’ complex digestive system. The bags are made with recycled pulp from milk cartons and rice bran, one of the main ingredients of the shika senbei savory
RSS