Have We Forgotten Covid’s Lessons?

This summer’s deadly heat calls for news coverage based on science, not ideology.

In June, during the first of the record heat waves to scorch Europe this summer, “the London Ambulance Service fielded over 53,000 calls, surpassing the number received when the Covid-19 pandemic was at its height in March 2020,” Bloomberg Green reported this week. And conditions inside U.K. hospitals were “far worse” than during Covid, Fiona Brennan, an anesthetist in Cardiff, Wales, told Bloomberg. It was so hot inside surgery rooms for cancer patients that basic procedures faltered, Brennan said, adding that some patients were so sweaty that she had to constantly check that intravenous drips were not “slipping out” of their bodies.

Also, as with Covid, early mortality figures dramatically understated the death tolls to come. The U.K. Health Security Agency initially estimated that 2,877 people died from heat-related ailments in May and June. France estimated 5,700 excess deaths took place between June 17 and July 2. Other analyses, benefiting from more complete data and advanced methodology, blamed the heat for as many as 20,000 deaths across Europe. And that was before the June heat wave was followed by an additional four heat waves that surely boosted the number of sick and dying.

Europe is not the only hot spot. In India, temperatures in the capital, Delhi, soared to 54 degrees Celsius (129 degrees Fahrenheit), pushing the limits of human survival, especially for the city’s poor, and again illustrating a core injustice of the climate emergency: The people who did the least to cause it are the ones who tend to suffer the........

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