11/07/2021 – Air Quality of China

The pandemic has caused a lot of negative affects, yet their is still a silver lining. Before the pandemic, highly populated cities in China had terrible air quality. There were large concentrations of lung damaging particles in the air that forced many people to wear masks before the pandemic. Personally, I know this issue very well because I used to visit my grandparents in Beijing very frequently. During my time in the capitol of China, blue sky appeared only once or twice because of how bad the smog was. Wearing masks were very common. In fact, now that I look back at it, it looked like they were in a pandemic before Covid-19 was introduced. However, this pandemic was very beneficial to the air quality. According to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the lung damaging particles in the air in 337 cities went down about 8.3% in 2020. The water quality of China also benefited from the pandemic. According to Discover Thomas Reuters, out of the water samples taken from 2000 sites, 85% met the standard for human use. That is better than the 78% from before.