Q&A: A Harvard Expert on Environment and Health Discusses Possible Ties Between COVID and Climate

Doctors and public health researchers are getting an increasingly accurate and nuanced picture of the many ways climate change damages human health. 

Dr. Aaron Bernstein has witnessed firsthand how
climate change and public health are intertwined. 

Now, questions have arisen about whether climate change contributed to the outbreak of COVID-19, whose spread the World Health Organization declared a pandemic on Wednesday. For example, did habitat loss, driven in part by climate change, make it easier for pathogens to spread among wildlife and for the virus to jump to humans? Does air pollution, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, make some people more vulnerable to contracting the illness? 

We spoke to Dr. Aaron Bernstein, a pediatrician and Interim Director of The Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health (Harvard C-CHANGE), who has seen firsthand how climate change can harm children, mostly through the burning of fossil fuels. We asked him about the ways that climate change might have played a role in the emergence of COVID-19, about any parallels between "virus denial" and climate denial and about how to prepare for the inevitable next pandemic. A lightly-edited version of our conversation follows.

Read the story from Inside Climate News by Veela Banerjee - “Q&A: A Harvard Expert on Environment and Health Discusses Possible Ties Between COVID and Climate.”