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Smoke from Canada’s wildfires killed nine-year-old Carter Vigh – and 82,000 others around the world
(www.theguardian.com)
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I'm not surprised. I don't live near the wildfires, but our air quality was often in the danger zone these past few years. Yet I saw people out walking, jogging, cycling... without any kind of mask or respirator, as if they were oblivious to the dangers.
I mean, FFS, even the photo in the article, if the guy spraying the ground. The SKY IS ORANGE, and he's out without a mask or anything. Dude, WTF?
Any weather app would give you a notification about air quality pretty early in advance, so it's not like most people would be caught-out unexpectedly.
And it's not like we haven't normalized "masking up" by now, since the pandemic. So it's such a small inconvenience to save your lungs. Just do it.
The mask that you would wear to protect yourself from wildfire smoke is not some flimsy surgical mask. Those only minimized aerosols coming out of your mouth, it's not a filter, it doesn't make wildfire smoke air safer to breath.
I think most people learned that because of COVID, didn't they? N95s (worn properly) block 95% of pm2.5, which takes a danger level of 400 μg/m³ (well into the hazardous range) down to 20 μg/m³ (about half the cutoff for "unhealthy").
Yet only a handful of people locally were wearing N95s when the levels were that high, locally. People just don't care about their health, I guess? Not sure how else to interpret it.