You Can Either Smoke Two Packs A Day Or Breathe In the Air In Delhi Right Now
New Delhi (CNN) It was early on Tuesday morning when residents in the Indian capital of Delhi first began to notice the thick white haze that had descended across the city. Initially viewed as a mild irritant, by mid-week its debilitating effects were evident to all, as the city struggled to adapt to the new eerie, martian-like conditions brought about by the pollution.
With visibility severely reduced, trains have been canceled, planes delayed and cars have piled into each other, with multiple traffic accidents reported across the city.
Air quality readings in the Indian capital have reached frightening levels in recent days, at one point topping the 1,000 mark on the US embassy air quality index. The World Health Organization considers anything above 25 to be unsafe.
That measure is based on the concentration of fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, per cubic meter. The microscopic particles, which are smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, are considered particularly harmful because they are small enough to lodge deep into the lungs and pass into other organs, causing serious health risks.
Breathing in air with a PM2.5 content of between 950 to 1,000 is considered roughly equivalent to smoking 44 cigarettes a day, according to the independent Berkeley Earth science research group.
Oh boy that’s not good. When the WHO thinks that anything above 25 on the US embassy air quality index is dangerous, and you're sitting at around 900-1,000, it issss time to leave! Not only are people literally running into each other, because there’s an alien smog preventing them from seeing two feet in front of them, but breathing the outside air is like smoking 44 cigarettes a day. How many cigarettes are in a pack? Twenty! Just lounging with your window open in Delhi equals smoking two packs a day!!! Oh my god. I mean at that point everybody who already smokes a pack a day must just be thinking, “Oh we’re really fucked now.”
This is obviously terrible news, and really sad for the tons of people who don’t have the means to get out of the city- can you imagine living in a place where you just had to breathe in poison? Like, not putting harmful toxic material in your lungs was something you had to worry about on top of everything else? I can barely make it to the subway without almost getting smoked by a bus, and on top of that, I'm a terrible smoker! I tried it once to get a girl's number, I did not get the number, and I coughed everywhere before someone lent me an inhaler; I would make it all of fifteen minutes in Delhi. And yes, I realize there’s a certain level of smog in any city you live in. But if there’s a day to be thankful that our privileged butts were born in a country where we don’t have to worry about suffocating on our walks to work, it’s today.
P.S. Would your clothes smell worse from smoking two packs a day, or taking a walk around Delhi when it's in full smog-mode?
