The following is the In 2020, Americans will have an average of more than eight hours without electricity From EIA recommended by recordtrend.com. And this article belongs to the classification: Life data.
As power outages worsen across the United States, experts are sounding the alarm about the potentially disastrous impact on human health. Last week, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that Americans will have no electricity for an average of more than eight hours in 2020 – the worst year on record since 2013.
Some of these blackouts are fatal: dozens of people died in Louisiana after Hurricane IDA, which cut off power before the heat wave; In Texas, hundreds of people were killed in a power outage caused by a deep freeze. In fact, there is a more subtle intersection between electricity and health. For example, if people with potential health problems are placed in a tense and overheated environment, it will undoubtedly exacerbate the problem, or refrigerated drugs will deteriorate during power failure. All these risks worry public health experts that Americans seem to face longer blackouts due to extreme weather.
“From a health perspective, this is really worrying,” said Joan Casey, an environmental epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Melman School of public health
The relationship between health and electricity has many aspects. Some are clear, such as a person relying on a ventilator to breathe or carbon monoxide poisoning caused by people running a generator incorrectly, etc. Casey says others are more difficult to distinguish. People with heart disease may have a heart attack a few hours after the power failure, but it is difficult to conclude that the heart attack is only due to the power failure.
Most studies on the health effects of power outages focus on hospitalization after major events, such as the freezing of Texas this year or a citywide power outage in New York City in 2003. Studies such as that specific power outage in New York City show that the number of hospitalizations due to kidney and respiratory problems has increased. The overall death toll has also increased.
But less has been done to understand how shorter, more sporadic blackouts – which may increase over the course of the year – harm health.
“We haven’t done a good study, such as Maine, where power is off all winter,” Casey said.
Last week’s report showed that Maine had the most total blackouts, with residents facing an average of about 30 hours of blackouts. Casey pointed out that there is no extensive analysis to link cold related deaths in Maine with continuous power outages. Although intermittent but frequent power outages may cause health problems, it is difficult to prove this connection quantitatively. “I’m sure there will be some attributable mortality, but that’s what we’ll miss,” Casey said.
In addition, Casey also suspects that the covid-19 pandemic means that the time to turn off the lights during 2020 is worse for people’s health than in other years. People spend more time at home, so they may stay at home longer without heating or air conditioning. Out of concern about covid-19, they may avoid going to other homes with electricity. “People can go to fewer places. It can be said that this pandemic will exacerbate the link between power failure and health,” Casey said.
Experts have a good understanding of the baseline levels of diseases and deaths related to large-scale power outages. They can track them through hospitalization data after major events. However, much work has not been done to calculate the relationship between short and frequent power outages and death or disease rates. Since these types of problems are usually not included in the study, Casey suspects that any current estimate of the health risk of power outages – focusing only on acute and emergency events – may be underestimated.
Casey hopes that researchers can do more research on this problem in the future. A more comprehensive understanding of this problem is very important, because with the escalation of disasters caused by climate change and the aging of the U.S. power grid, blackouts are expected to continue and become more and more serious. Therefore, strengthening and maintaining lighting infrastructure is a key public health undertaking, which has received some much-needed attention after Congress recently passed the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
At this point, if there is no reliable power supply, keeping people as healthy as possible will become a major challenge. It may be helpful to establish a structure that does not rely too much on heating and cooling systems to maintain a constant temperature. But most medical devices need electricity. Ideally, the renewable energy transformation will include efforts to promote local power generation and standby power systems, which can help maintain power flow to support critical medical needs even if major weather events damage the larger grid.
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