SAD: Children kept indoors as smog blankets Beijing

The WHO consideres the safe level of PM2.5 particles to be 25 micrograms per cubic meter and China has a national standard of 75 micrograms. Some suburban neighborhoods logged levels up in the 900s on Monday.

Outside a packed children’s hospital in downtown Beijing, parents and grandparents complained about the smog’s impact on small children.

“The shocking levels of air pollution we have seen in the last few days are a serious danger to the health of hundreds of millions of citizens”, Greenpeace said.

The smog covers more than 200,000 square miles around Beijing, neighboring Tianjing and the surrounding province of Hebei, all in the country’s northeast.

Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping is missing out on all the fun due to his impeccably timed trip to the COP21 UN Conference on climate change summit in Paris. A day later, Beijing’s government issued its first orange alert – the second highest of four warning levels – in nearly two years. Most of China’s power is coal-generated. Tests found the burning of coal to blame for most of the latest pollution surge, the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing Zhang Dawei, the head of Beijing’s environmental monitoring centre.

A woman uses a tablet to take a souvenir photo of the Turret of the Forbidden City shrouded with heavy pollution and fog in Beijing, Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2015. Smog was the fourth-most popular real-time keyword search on the microblogging site Sina Weibo at one point on Tuesday.

The city’s Environmental Protection Administration has been under fire for issuing and maintaining only the orange alert even though air quality was so bad that readings were off the charts. 2 Experimental Primary School on Tuesday allowed students to choose whether to study at home or in school while Beijing Digital School is running classes online in view of the high levels of pollution in the city.

It is expected that strong cold air moving from west to east will blow away the air pollutants in the capital and neighboring regions on December 2. Certain sections on a highway outside the capital also had to be closed on account of the lack of visibility, the Transportation Ministry said.