I've read that pollution in Beijing often makes exercise unwise. Do the masks actually make any difference?
I'm more interested in bicycling in other places, especially Foshan & Guangzhou.
Travel Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for road warriors and seasoned travelers. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityI've read that pollution in Beijing often makes exercise unwise. Do the masks actually make any difference?
I'm more interested in bicycling in other places, especially Foshan & Guangzhou.
Like @Tom said in the comment :
Masks block only a portion of the pollution
The problem with the Chinese haze is due to 2 types of particles : pm10 and pm2.5 and those last ones (pm2.5) are really small and you can't protect yourself even when wearing a mask. Event if the mask specially mentioned "works against pm2.5" because they are lying.
I used to lived there during one year and most of the embassy recommendations during high pollution days were : stay home, close windows, and no physical activity at all.
You can check real time pollution level of each particles with a lot of mobile apps like this one China Air Quality.
Did a quick web search. The first hit, not only shows hourly reports for Guangzhou, but it also has a chart of recommendations for different levels, and says that there are IOS and Android apps to get the U.S. Embassy's version. Whether China's "great firewall" prevents it from working, I cannot say. They imply it can be found in Apple's U.S. store, but not so.
Today's levels in GuangZhou are "Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups."
There is a link to stateair.net which has more info and allows one to download the historical values for the entire year.