"It has been described as a silver lining of COVID-19 – albeit one that is likely to be temporary. Stay-at-home orders and factory closures due to pandemic have resulted in vast improvements to air quality in many of the world’s largest cities, including Wuhan in China, where the pandemic originated late last year. The Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air has even estimated that declines in air pollutants may have prevented 11,000 deaths across Europe. But in Yangon, there has been much less change to air pollution levels in recent months. At times, the city has had among the worst air quality in the world, according to monitoring sources such as Air Quality Index and PurpleAir. The main sources of the particulate matter that contribute to air pollution in Yangon include vehicles, factories, generators, smoke from cooking fires – especially those using charcoal – and the burning of rubbish. Support independent journalism in Myanmar. Sign up to be a Frontier member. As in other cities, though, social distancing and other precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Yangon mean that fewer people are travelling to work, leading to much less traffic on the roads, and many factories have closed. The stubbornly poor air quality readings suggest that these are not the key causes of poor air quality, at least during the March to May hot season. Air Quality Yangon, managed by a group of students from American University Yangon, is a platform that aims to create awareness about air pollution in Yangon, mainly on social media. Each day it posts two updates to Facebook using data collected from air quality sensors installed at different sites throughout the city, and information reported from a reference grade monitor at the United States embassy..."