Article by Renee Salas, James Schultz and Caren Solomon. Vol. 383, Issue 11. The New England Journal of Medicine.
July 15, 2020.
The intensity, frequency, and duration of climate-related extreme events — including hurricanes, wildfires, floods, heat waves, and droughts — are increasing, and these events often overlap temporally and geographically, jeopardizing SARS-CoV-2 infection control. Both the Atlantic hurricane and western wildfire seasons are predicted to be worse than average in 2020. But proven standard disaster mitigation strategies — mass sheltering and population evacuation — increase the risk of viral transmission by moving large groups of people and gathering them close together. For example, evacuation orders were issued for more than 1 million people during Hurricane Florence in 2018. Covid-19 health risks are even greater when weather events are more intense, since widespread catastrophic damage results in mass displacement, which risks introducing the virus into new locales and clustering vulnerable survivors together in temporary accommodations.
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