Western Wildfires Pushing Residents Indoors May Be Driving Spread Of Respiratory Illnesses, Study Finds

The Hill (6/18, Udasin) reports a study published Wednesday in PLOS Climate suggests that “wildfire-induced declines in air quality have led to a substantial surge in indoor activities, creating prime conditions for the transmission of respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19 and the flu.” The researchers analyzed “air quality data for particularly hard-hit counties in Oregon and Washington from July through November 2020.” They were able to “model indoor and outdoor activity patterns by acquiring records from a mobile phone database that tracks user visits to more than 4.6 million points of interest nationwide.” They observed that “increased indoor activity significantly impacted disease spread, with that effect decreasing with illnesses that have a longer generation time – the time between a primary case infection and the development of secondary cases.” For diseases with generation times of less than one week, such as COVID-19 and influenza, the authors identified “a notable increase in relative peak incidence.”