Resiliency: That’s the Plan!

Are you concerned, as I am, about our community’s ability to bounce back from the effects of the coronavirus? “Resiliency” is used to describe the ability to recover from a disruption like the pandemic or climate change and to plan for, adapt to, and even thrive during times of great change.

Figure 1: The Student Food Forest on Campus (photo credit: Emily Thompson)

I recently had the opportunity to attend the 2020 Higher Education Conference on Climate Leadership in Atlanta, GA. The conference was hosted by Second Nature (formerly the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education), and the key point I took away was that resiliency is something for which we can plan. We can plan for resiliency in a business, a state, a country and even a community college, like the one where I teach.

Fantastic!  To plan for a resilient future for our community college, we can look at some of the dimensions of resiliency that need to be implemented.  To be effective, the plan should be made by stakeholders at our college and the surrounding communities.

The first dimension is social equity and governance.

          There are a couple of issues to address here.  Do we have strong networks between our community college and surrounding communities and is our governance inclusive of all participating groups in the community?

          If we imaging governance as a tree, the tree will only stand if the roots in the community are strong.  If they are not strong in one neighborhood, on one side, the tree will fall in a heavy wind.           

For example, what we see with regard to the coronavirus is that Blacks in our state have a higher rate of infection and death than whites, according to Thebault, Ba Tran, Williams, 2020 (more here). If we then want to create a resiliency plan that addresses the coronavirus pandemic and we’re looking at governance, we need representation from Blacks as well as white for there to be equity. 

          Additionally, our college must have strong town-gown connections that can be leveraged in times of great change. Existing networks make it far easier to share knowledge and resources when needed.  For example, in the current pandemic, the department heads at our community college donated gloves and masks to staff at nearby medical facilities.

The second dimension is health and wellness.

          The issue here is, do all groups on campus and our larger community have food, water, housing and health care?

Well, we know they don’t. In the two cities near our community college, roughly 25% or more of the residents are living in poverty (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018), which leads to disparities in access to food, water, housing, healthcare and overall health.  One way to see this is in disparities in asthma prevalence.  In Washtenaw County, 19% of adults and 10% of children have asthma.  Alarmingly, the incidence of asthma is 37% for Blacks/African Americans in Washtenaw County, according to a report from Washtenaw County Public Health (2013; you can read it here).  For comparison, the CDC reports that nationally, 8% of adults and 8% of children have asthma and 11% of Blacks nationally have asthma (Centers for Disease Control, Asthma Surveillance, 2018; read it here).

          Some studies have hinted at better health outcomes among populations of asthma patients receiving better food. Wood et al. (2012) did a randomized clinical trial of the effects of diet on asthma, finding that patients eating 5 servings of vegetables and two of fruit each day had the best relief of asthma symptoms (more here ). Going back to the tree analogy, even trees feed one another through their roots in times of stress (read it here).  We will need to work on getting high quality, locally grown food on campus and into the surrounding communities in order to ensure better health that may fight asthma.  Additional actions can be taken to provide additional resiliency in the dimension of health and wellness. 

Figure 1 shows the Student Food Forest at the community college and Figure 2 shows a Farmer's Market in the community. These are both examples of ways to increase the health and wellness of members of the community.

Figure 2.  Healthy Food (Photo Credit: a2gov.org)

The third dimension is infrastructure.

          The question to answer here is, in the event of another pandemic or a climate change disaster, are our communication and transportation systems resilient?  Using the tree analogy, the roots of trees provide conduits for both chemical communication and transport of nutrients. (Read about it here ). If the root system is not well-developed, the tree will receive less information and fewer goods in times of stress.  So it is in our community.

In terms of communication during the current coronavirus situation, the faculty at our community college worked tremendously hard to put their classes online in one week . However, not all students have computers or internet access. To plan for resiliency, we need to find ways to make computers and the Internet accessible to all.

We do have pretty good public transportation to our community college, although it is not especially convenient or timely.  Looking to the immediate future with the coronavirus, if we decide to have on campus classes in the fall, we will have to find a way to get students to campus.  Because students may not be able to afford gas for their cars during the expected economic downturn, we could consider running an electric bus service (less polluting!) into the nearby neighborhoods.  We’ll have to study this dimension to find ways to build resiliency into both our community's communication and transportation systems.

         

In summary, the community college and surrounding communities need to work together on Social Equity and Governance, Health and Wellness, and Infrastructure.  In doing so, they can plan for resiliency for the future.

This blogpost was written for the benefit of students at Washtenaw Community College and the community as part of my sabbatical activities for winter 2020.  I am solely responsible for the content and hold the copyright for the work. Feel free to use the information in this blog; just credit me with a link back to my blog! -Emily Thompson, Ph.D.

Coronavirus: the Unequal Opportunity Virus

COVID-19, or the corona virus, is the name of the disease caused by the virus SARS-CoV-2. The virus initials stand for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2; more on nomenclature here.  SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus, which means RNA is on the inside of a membrane sphere spiked with (red) proteins, as shown in Figure 1. The sphere is made up of membrane from the previous host, meaning the person who sneezed on someone else and gave them the virus.  Yup, that’s right.  The virus went into the host, multiplied and broke out again covered in the membrane of the host.  Gross, efficient and, in the case of COVID-19, deadly.

Figure 1. SARS-CoV-2 virus particles (from cdc.gov)

I’ve been following issues in public health in southeast Michigan, and COVID 19 infections and deaths in this region show troubling trends. The rate of deaths in Michigan are among the higher rates posted world-wide. On April 1, the Michigan.gov/coronavirus website published data from which I calculated a crude death rate of 3.6% for April 1 and a death rate of  6.1% for April 12 (Table 1; data from michigan.gov/coronavirus).  The world death rate, according the the World Health Organization and reported in Nature was 3.4% on April 3  (read it here).

Table 1. Calculated crude death rates due to coronavirus in Michigan

This is mirrored by significantly higher infection rates and higher death rates in certain counties in Southeast Michigan.  These counties include Oakland and Macomb counties to the north and and Wayne county immediately south, with the city in Detroit located in Wayne county.  In Figure 2, the number of cases per county is shown and you can see a concentration of cases in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties (michigan.gov/coronavirus.)

Figure 2 Total cases by county in Oakland (Ok), Macomb(Mb)

Washtenaw (Ww) and Wayne (Wy) counties, modified

from Michigan.gov/coronavirus, accessed April 12)

In Table 2, I've calculated the death rates for Detroit and four neighboring counties (data from Detroit is given separately; data from michigan.gov/coronavirus).   It is shocking to see that the death rates are higher in Detroit, Wayne, Macomb and Oakland than in Washtenaw on April 1 and they are much higher by April 12 (Table 2).

Table 2: Calculated crude death rates due to coronavirus in 4 counties and the City of Detroit

What could cause these much higher death rates in Detroit and Wayne, Macomb and Oakland counties?

A recent report by Thebault, Ba Tran and Williams (2020) from the Washington Post states that counties with Black majorities have higher rates of infection and death than counties that have white majorities.  In Michigan, according to their analysis, 33% of cases are African Americans and almost 40% of deaths are African Americans, although African Americans make up only 14% of the state’s population (read it here). 

What could cause  higher death rates among Blacks/African Americans?  Brookings Institute scholar, Rashawn Ray, states in a Brookings Institute blog (2020) that pre-existing health conditions and health disparity are the main contributors to the higher death rate among blacks and African Americans (2020).  Disparities, he explains, start with redlining minorities into subpar neighborhoods where they have less access to good food and green spaces for exercise, and where they are farther from hospitals and have lower-quality pharmacies. Every health threat leads to more illness and death in these neighborhoods than others (read the article here).

Rashawn Ray goes on to say that occupation is another factor in higher death rates among blacks and African Americans. Blacks and African Americans in areas with higher death rates are more likely to be considered essential during the pandemic and to work at jobs with a high degree of public contact.  Blacks, he said, make up a significant part of the workforce in occupations like food service worker, bus driver, and cashier.  Their dedication to serve others can have deadly consequences (read the article here).

I learned in an article in Metrotimes (Neavling, 2019) that an additional factor leading to high death rates in Detroit is lack of water to wash hands.  One of the CDC recommendations to prevent transmission of the virus is to wash hands with soap and water. However,  between April and August of 2019, the water was turned off in almost 12,000 homes in Detroit due to lack of payment. According  a report in Mlive (Moore, 2020), on March 28, Governer  Whitmer signed an executive order mandating that all water  get turned back on so everyone in Detroit is able to clean their hands to help prevent spread of the virus in their homes.  

Figure 3. PM2.5 emissions in Michigan in 2014
(Michigan Annual Air Quality Report from 2019)

Finally, there is one more possibility for why Blacks have a higher infection rate and death rate in an unpublished report from Harvard University’s Chan School of Public Health, as reported in the New York Times (Friedman, 2020).  They state there is a correlation between death from coronavirus and PM2.5 air pollution (Particulate Matter 2.5 micron).  And, the air in SE Michigan has some issues!  The 2018 annual air quality report for Michigan states, “Particulate trends show that particulate concentrations have decreased, and the state is in compliance for all particulate NAAQS; however, Michigan has had past nonattainment issues in Southeast Michigan for TSP, PM10 and PM2.5. (p. 38; read it here ) The data on PM2.5 pollution in Michigan can be found in Figure 3 and the data on number of cases is in Figure 2.  If you compare the two maps, you can see the geographic correlation between where the highest PM2.5 air pollution is and where the highest number of cases are,.  Furthermore, we'd expect more deaths where there are more cases.

The news about higher rates of infection and higher death rates in Blacks/African Americans in Michigan spurred Governor Whitmer on April 9 to create the Michigan Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities to study the problem in Michigan (read the announcement on michigan.gov here).

Interestingly, there is a report by Healy in the LA Times (2020) that there is another group that seems to have a higher death rate.  The report is that males might be both more susceptible to infection and more likely to die than females. This trend is under current study and you can read about it here.  

We desperately need to fix inequalities in the structure of our society, especially in Southeast Michigan.  Everyone needs have access to clean water and air, good food, excellent health care, high-quality education, environmentally-friendly transportation, and a good standard of living. I’m not sure how to fix these disparities, but we must stop institutionalized racism, sexism, ageism, and other isms that separate us, preventing us from living and working together and, importantly these days, fighting coronavirus together.

This blogpost was written for the benefit of the learning community at Washtenaw Community College and beyond as part of my sabbatical activities for Winter 2020.  I am solely responsible for the content and hold the copyright for the work. Feel free to use the information in this blog; just credit me with a link back to my blog! -Emily Thompson, Ph.D.