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Air quality is bad all over the United States, including the Bay Area, according to the American Lung Association's 2019 State Of The Air Report, and the conditions have gotten worse.
"We found that more than 141 million people live in counties that earned an 'F' for unhealthy air. That is more than four in ten people in the United States. That is seven million more people than in our 2018 report," said Janice Nolen, the American Lung Association's Assistant Vice President of National Policy.
The report, which covers 2015-2017, said that the Bay Area withstood increased forms of air pollution due to higher temperatures and severe wildfire conditions in 2017, according to Will Barrett, the director of advocacy and clean air in California for the American Lung Associaiton.
"For the first time, not a single Bay Area county earned an A for short-term particle pollution," said Barrett. "And there were three fewer As for ozone than in last year's report."
The report grades U.S. counties on their level of harmful ozone and particle pollution over a three-year period, and details trends from metropolitan areas across the nation.
California had made a lot of progress toward cutting ozone heavy emissions from cars and factories over the past couple of decades, ever since the Lung Association started compiling and issuing this report.
But the unhealthy impact of wildfires shows up in other data collected for the report.
"Of the 25 cities with the most days of high levels on average each year, twenty suffered more days of unhealthy particle pollution," said Nolen. "Eight of those reached their highest number of unhealthy days on record for this pollutant. Why this change? Wildfires."
This report covers 2015-2017, so it doesn't even factor in the pollution experienced when a blanket of smoke blew in from the Camp Fire in Butte County hovered above the Bay Area for days last fall.
The threat now, the experts say, is national climate change policies that don't do anything to address the growing threat.
"Stopping or retreating cannot be an option," Nolen said. "Climate change is a public health emergency that is beginning to reverse our progress. We must act now to protect health from climate change."