The National Weather Service has extended its air quality alerts through Friday for much of the state, with the air quality index expected to reach the "unhealthy" level, and some hourly concentrations reaching the "very unhealthy" range.
Hospitals are already seeing the impacts of the last two days, said Dr. Ike Okereke, a thoracic surgeon and air quality researcher at Henry Ford Health.
"If you look at the number of admissions for lung related illnesses, that has increased in the last few days,” he said.
Patients are coming into the ER with shortness of breath, coughs, and sore throats. But the greatest risk is for those with underlying problems, like asthma.
“Detroit's one of the most challenging places in the country to live with asthma,” said Okereke, who recently co-authored a study linking gentrification to a “reduction” in air quality.
“Detroit also has one of the highest [rate of] mortalities from asthma. So that is one of the immediate problems you may have, is death from respiratory distress. And once you get respiratory distress and low oxygen level and low oxygen concentration, that can lead to a host of other downstream problems.”
Black, hispanic and low-income people are disproportionately affected by asthma, and communities in the Metro Detroit area have already been impacted by increased levels of construction and traffic congestion, Okereke said.
"When you add on that episodic catastrophic events like wildfires, this unfortunately could be a trend that we see in future years,” he said. “And it might be more episodic than every couple of months we might be dealing with this weekly, unfortunately, unless we try to work on ways from an individual to federal level to combat this.”
