You’ve waited more than a year to walk out without a mask, take a deep breath and enjoy the outdoors. Not long after doing so, your eyes are itching, you’re sneezing and you have trouble breathing. That’s because you have allergies.
If this allergy season seems worse than ever, it’s not just in your head.
According to a recent study, allergy season not only is getting longer — it increased by 20 days from 1990 to 2018 — but pollen concentrations are also higher.
Already this year, Atlanta has seen 19 “extremely high” pollen days, when the count is above 1,500.
“This is clearly a more severe allergy season than we’ve had in a long time,” Dr. Stanley M. Fineman, an allergist and immunologist at Atlanta Allergy & Asthma and past president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, told Healthline.
“We’re seeing a lot of patients complaining of more symptoms and not being able to deal with them with the over-the-counter medications available. That’s due to it getting warmer earlier and a longer and more potent pollen season,” he said.
You might not have noticed the pollen as much last year because you stayed indoors more and wore a mask whenever you ventured outside.
Dr. Anna H. Nowak-Wegrzyn, a pediatric allergist at Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone in New York, said COVID-19 precautions might have offered a reprieve from the worsening allergy season, but the overall trend is not encouraging.
“I’m worried about next year,” she said, when people are less likely to wear a mask or get out of the habit of washing their hands.
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