The UN General Assembly has been taking place this week in New York. Headlines were of course grabbed by Trump and the walk-out of Netanyahu’s speech, as well as the US’s cancellation of the visa of Colombia’s left-wing president Gustavo Petro.
There was, however, what is officially known as a “side event” at the United Nations headquarters. The event was titled, “Healthy Indoor Air: A Global Call to Action.”
The campaign’s goal is to entrench clean and healthy indoor air as a recognised human right. Its most significant target is airborne SARS-CoV-2, but the aim is to establish new, long-term norms around the issue. The group argues that the quality of indoor air is a key determinant of the health, resilience and equity of our societies.
Healthy Indoor Air’s profile was boosted by a rousing speech by “youth advocate” Violet Affleck, the daughter of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner.
“Many of you in this room fought the long and hard battle against indoor smoking,” said Violet Affleck. “We can and we must do that again. We can recognise filtered air as a human right as intuitively and naturally as we do filtered water.”
Affleck commented that when she was younger, she didn’t understand why no-smoking signs were even needed on aircraft. “We can create clean air infrastructure that is so ubiquitous and so obviously necessary that tomorrow’s children don’t even know why we need it.”
Affleck herself has been affected by long COVID, describing dizziness and shortness of breath that persisted after remission of initial onset symptoms. She habitually wears an n-95 mask.
Although we are still at an early stage of COVID science, we know that one infection can result in damage to almost every cell in the body, including not just the lungs but also the brain, heart, nerves and blood vessels. Every infection increases the risk of long COVID, placing the person infected in further health danger.
“We need to be loud about the world that we were promised during the pandemic,” said Affleck. “when we and our institutions promised each other that if we only got out of that acute phase, we would do everything we can to protect our communities moving forward.”
The campaign makes clear that while the acute phase of the pandemic is behind us, the effort to minimise long-term damage and the fall-out from any future pandemic has only just begun.
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