Classes will be suspended this week at primary schools across Pakistan’s second-largest city, Lahore, after it reported record levels of pollution over the weekend.

       Education authorities in Punjab, the province that includes Lahore, announced on Sunday that classes for students up to the fifth grade would be canceled for a week because of the “deteriorating Air Quality Index.” Classes for students in higher grade levels will not be affected.

       The announcement came after the city reached an Air Quality Index of over 1,000 at one point on Sunday morning, according to IQAir, a Swiss air quality technology company. Anything above 301 is considered hazardous. The concentration of PM2.5, an especially harmful pollutant, reached nearly 30 times World Health Organization guidelines for safe air quality.

       Pollution levels in Lahore were so high that they were “outside the range of classification,” said Ahmad Rafay Alam, an environmental lawyer in Lahore and a member of the Pakistan Climate Change Council, a government body. “It’s an apocalypse,” he added.

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       Lahore was the world’s second-most-polluted city after New Delhi, India, according to IQAir data on Monday afternoon. Lahore regularly tops the list of the world’s most polluted, according to the index, which last year ranked Pakistan among the four countries with the worst air pollution on earth.

       The pollution has a severe impact on human life, Mr. Alam said, adding that people living in cities in Pakistan lose, on average, two years of life expectancy because of poor air quality.

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