- Poor air quality has many people breaking out their pandemic masks for protection.
- Wildfire smoke can lead to coughing and wheezing, symptoms smokers experience.
- A new calculator estimates how the air you're breathing compares to smoking cigarettes.
At my daughter's school pickup yesterday, I arrived to see that the administration had equipped all of the students with masks. Yes, those N95s that so many people loved to hate are back. I was relieved; I'd forgotten to send her with one in the morning, and the air quality had since plummeted.
Most adults were masked, too. The teachers, the crossing guards, and most of the parents and caregivers waiting to collect their kids looked like they had returned to the early days of the pandemic.
Of course, the kids were all complaining about the smell and the haze, and a few were clutching their necks and coughing, though I suspect they were just being dramatic as kids often are.
One parent, who admitted to tossing all of their masks in the trash recently, was complaining about the smell. Another person nearby was coughing — a real cough, though. It was the type of deep throaty noise that makes you think someone might have a secret pack-a-day habit, though I can't say that description fits anyone in my social circle, nor any of the kindergarteners.
There's good reason to draw a line between the dangers of smoke-filled air and cigarette smoke, even if the line isn't a perfect one.
Poor air quality can impact the body like tobacco
In 2020, when a slew of wildfires battered the West Coast, Dr. Kari Nadeau, a physician and scientist at Stanford University, reportedly said "being outside and breathing that air was similar to smoking seven cigarettes a day," the Times reported. Since then, she has shifted her position slightly: she believes that the effects may be even worse, since cigarettes have filters, she told the Times.
The air quality in and around New York City was off-the-charts bad yesterday. According to the New York Times, if your neighborhood has an AQI — or, air quality index — above 200, it is "very unhealthy." Where I live, in a suburb just north of the city, it was 364 yesterday afternoon. So, yeah, it was bad out there.
Like cigarette smoke, these conditions can lead to a slew of uncomfortable symptoms including headaches, sinus issues and, yes, wheezing and gouging, as Insider previously reported.
As we know, even secondhand smoke has long been linked to an increased risk of lung cancer, per the CDC. And while more research is needed, some studies have drawn a connection between wildfire smoke and lung cancer in firefighters.
Breathing in poor air, like smoking 18 cigarettes
Luck would have it, a Github user known as jasminedevv, has developed an online calculator to help those with a penchant for doomsday thinking (hi, it's me, I'm the problem it's me) determine just how much damage all this smoke might be doing to our lungs, as The Hill reported.
Taking research from Berkley University into account, jasminedevv's tool factors the time you've spent outdoors with the air quality in your area to spit out an estimate of the number of cigarettes that could be equivalent to.
An AQI of 64 over a 24-hour period amounts to one cigarette, The Hill reported.
With that math, my family and I would have endured the equivalent of around 18 cigarettes each if we were outside at that air quality level all day and night. Even just an hour at that level was equated to smoking a little more than three-quarters of a cigarette, something I certainly wouldn't want to expose my kids to.
Of course, all of this should be taken with a grain of salt — probably a larger, Kosher or flaky salt at that, since pollution affects us all differently, and there are many kinds of cigarettes.
Luckily, today is seeming better already, and we're still masking. But, it's nice — dare I even admit, a little fun — to have a tool like this to feed into my anxiety.