Central Washington University public health professors and students are moving into the second year of a research project looking at how poor air quality during wildfire season might affect the spread of COVID-19 in Yakima County.
“We’re really looking at the human behavior aspect in this pandemic and how easy or difficult it might be for people to continue to do COVID-19 prevention when air quality presents the challenge that it does,” Associate Professor Tishra Beeson said.
Beeson said some of the best prevention strategies for COVID-19 are to get outside, open windows and not gather indoors with multiple households. However, those strategies have been harder to implement this summer, due to people increasingly staying indoors to avoid record-high temperatures and poor air quality caused by wildfire smoke.