Tag Archives: health concerns

‘Godzilla dust cloud’ drifts over U.S. Southeast, raising health concerns

By Brendan O’Brien

(Reuters) – A massive plume of dust whipped up from the Sahara desert will hover over the U.S. Southeast this weekend, forecasters say, shrouding the region in a brown haze and raising more health concerns in states where the coronavirus crisis is worsening.

The 3,500-mile-long (5,600 km) cloud, dubbed the “Godzilla dust cloud,” traveled 5,000 miles (8,047 km) from North Africa before reaching the region stretching from Florida west into Texas and north into North Carolina through Arkansas, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.

“It’s a really dry layer of air that contains these very fine dust particulates. It occurs every summer,” said NWS meteorologist Patrick Blood. “Some of these plumes contain more particles, and right now we expecting a very large plume of dust in the Gulf Coast.”

This year, the dust is the most dense it has been in a half a century, several meteorologists told Reuters earlier this week as it crossed over the Caribbean.

The Saharan dust plume will hang over the region until the middle of next week, deteriorating the air quality in Texas, Florida and other states where the number of COVID-19 cases has recently spiked.

“There’s emerging evidence of potential interactions between air pollution and the risk of COVID, so at this stage we are concerned,” said Gregory Wellenius, an professor of environmental health at Boston University’s School of Public Health.

Air pollution can be especially detrimental for people who are at risk for or suffer from cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses, Wellenius added. Heart and lung problems heighten the risk of severe COVID-19.

The plume will create hazy skies and lower visibility. In the past, dust plumes from Africa have dumped a thin layer of dust onto vehicles in Houston, where air quality is always a concern, Blood said.

The dry air mass that carries the dust can suppress tropical storm and hurricane formation and can enhance and illuminate sunrises and sunsets, meteorologists said.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Bill Berkrot)

A grave concern: Coronavirus highlights burial plot shortages in cities

By Rina Chandran and Kim Harrisberg

BANGKOK/JOHANNESBURG (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the problem of scarce burial space in cities, even as health concerns and tight budgets force more families to opt against traditional grave burials, land rights experts said on Monday.

As cities around the world have rapidly expanded in recent decades, urban cemeteries have filled up or been dug up to build roads and homes, leading to an increase in cremations.

“This trend will continue with urbanisation. COVID-19 may just cause us to think about this in the immediate term,” said Peter Davies, an associate professor at the department of earth and environmental sciences at Australia’s Macquarie University.

“There would be increasing pressure for cremations as a more cost- and space-effective, and possibly safer solution from a disease transmission perspective,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Globally, there have been more than 2 million reported cases of the coronavirus, and more than 165,000 people have died, according to a Reuters tally.

Before the outbreak, in cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong where even columbaria for urns containing ashes have filled up, historians and conservationists moved to protect the last remaining cemeteries and safeguard their heritage and tradition.

In Britain, cities where burials are still the norm have proposed shared burial plots as space runs out.

The challenge facing city authorities now – to dispose of bodies quickly and safely – was brought to the fore when a New York City councilman said earlier this month that public parks may be used as temporary burial grounds.

City officials refuted the claim, but said some recent burials in a so-called potter’s field on Hart Island, which has been used since the 19th century for burying the poor or those with no known next of kin, included victims of the coronavirus.

In Ecuador, authorities are preparing an emergency burial ground on land donated by a private cemetery in Guayaquil, the country’s largest city, to address a shortage of burial plots.

COMMUNAL GRAVES

Cemeteries in South Africa have been asked to identify land for emergency burials, and consider “communal graves” for 20 bodies in the event of many coronavirus deaths, said Pepe Dass, chairman of the South African Cemeteries Association.

“South Africa has serious issues with access to land in metropolitan areas, but also in rural areas,” said Dass, adding that conservation and residential developments take precedence, not cemeteries because they are not considered sustainable.

“I definitely hope South Africa will become more sustainable in the way we think about burials. This is a wake up call.”

As the pandemic brings greater awareness of mortality and consideration of funerary practices, there is an opportunity to rethink how we care for the dead, said David Neustein, an architect in Sydney and an advocate of “natural burial”.

“It is the simplest, least energy-intensive alternative we have, and one that is highly compatible with environmental repair and regeneration,” he said of the process in which a body is simply put into the ground in designated areas, casket-free.

Neustein had earlier proposed a “burial belt”, where bodies are placed in the soil among newly planted vegetation near towns and cities. It would reforest cleared land and create “near-limitless” land for burial, he said.

“It can be implemented much more quickly than conventional cemeteries … and provide lasting green monuments to this terrible time,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst in New York; Editing by Michael Taylor. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly. Visit http://news.trust.org)

DSV plans Shanghai-Alabama cargo flights to ease capacity constraints amid coronavirus

COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Freight-forwarder DSV Panalpina said on Friday it would start direct cargo flights between Shanghai and Huntsville, Alabama from next week to cope with capacity constraints caused by the coronavirus outbreak in China.

The global freight industry has been hard-hit by uncertain demand and crews’ health concerns following the outbreak of the deadly virus in China, leading airlines and freight firms to scale back services, causing delivery delays and mounting backlogs.

Starting on Feb. 25, DSV plans to operate flights between Shanghai and Huntsville thrice weekly using the firm’s Boeing 747-8 freighter plane, it said in a statement.

“Due to the risk of spreading of the coronavirus (COVID-19), multiple airlines have either suspended or reduced the number of flights to and from mainland China,” it said.

Crew on DSV’s plane would rest in South Korea before flying to Shanghai and would virtually not disembark the plane while in Shanghai before returning to the United States with cargo.

“By doing it this way we can safely have this setup,” Flemming Nielsen, executive vice president, told Reuters.

Last week DSV said the coronavirus was squeezing air and sea freight capacity, but that it was still possible to ship goods on airplanes to countries neighboring China and fly them out from there.

DSV said it estimates capacity has shrunk by 5,000 tons a day due to the suspension of flights to China.

(Reporting by Nikolaj Skydsgaard; Editing by Susan Fenton)