COVID & WILDFIRE CONCERN—Wildfires can increase #COVID19 death too. Notably Harvard study finds:

1 μg/m3 increase in PM2.5 8% increase in COVID-19 death rate.

How bad is West Coast #wildfires? 100-400 μg/m3 regularly.

Yes, the math gets brutal.
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/covid-pm 

2) Notably, here is how much risk increase. The study was done in April before the West Coast wildfires started. Hence their upper Q5 (5th quintile— ie 20% highest values) was only >10.74 and not even the >50-100 values regularly seen today in CA, OR, WA. https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/covid-pm/files/pm_and_covid_mortality_med.pdf

3) That said, it’s an ecological study, but well adjusted. And again, they did not have values or PM2.5 in the hundreds like West Coast currently has. So hard to fully extrapolate to that super high crazy range. But we should take the precautionary principle for COVID.

4) This air pollution research group at Harvard led by @francescadomin8 (and formerly @JohnsHopkins) is extremely reputable in air pollution science and has published in many top medical journals. Let’s therefore please heed the warning on air quality and wildfires.