Thunderstorm asthma season is on now. Are we ready for another event if it happens during COVID-19?

Melbourne's 2016 thunderstorm asthma event was the largest and most devastating thunderstorm asthma event ever recorded worldwide, says Frank Thien, director of respiratory medicine at Eastern Health.

It resulted in over 3,500 emergency presentations, 35 ICU admissions and 10 deaths.

The majority of those affected were younger people.

"Of the people who turned up into our EDs in the thousands in 2016, the median age was 32," Professor Thien says.

Before that night, there had been one or two reports of deaths associated with thunderstorm asthma in the distant past, but never so many on one occasion, says Jo Douglass, a physician in allergy and clinical immunology at the University of Melbourne and the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

How can you protect yourself from thunderstorm asthma?

 "One of the big risks about thunderstorm asthma is that for many people it's completely unexpected, and so they may not have awareness of or access to reliever treatment [the blue puffers] or an action plan to keep themselves safe," Professor Douglass says.

"In the 2016 event and perhaps in those similarly earlier — 2010 — emergency departments and emergency facilities were somewhat overwhelmed by the volume of asthma sufferers who presented."

About two-thirds of the people who went to hospital in 2016 didn't know they had asthma, but when questioned, a further half of those people reported previous asthma symptoms including shortness of breath, cough, wheeze and night waking with cough or wheeze.

The 2016 event taught us how severe thunderstorm asthma can be and that people's lives can be at risk, Professor Douglass says.

"I think it changed our perception of hay fever as being a benign but troublesome condition," she says.

"It has caused us to recognise the risk of hay fever and asthma when they are together, to try and remember people with asthma are at great risk of thunderstorm asthma.

"And to really encourage both prediction, so people can stay out of harm's way, and also preventative treatment, to keep people with asthma safe."

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Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2020-10-29/thunderstorm-asthma-event-in-covid-19/12795236 , viewed 4th November 2020.