Under-counting, under-representation of data dogs management of Covid biomedical waste: CSE | India News
BATHINDA: India is sitting on a potential powder keg of serious infection — while the lengthening Covid-19 pandemic has spiked up the country’s generation of biomedical wastes and the infrastructure for managing this extremely hazardous waste is on the verge of collapse, finds a new assessment from Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).
The statistics tell the tale — almost 20 per cent of the biomedical waste India generates on any given day since the pandemic’s first wave is Covid-19-related, says data collected by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) using the COVID19BWM app, designed to keep track of the waste generated due to the pandemic.
However, even this hefty percentage might be an under-representation, cautions the assessment. Atin Biswas, programme director, Solid Waste Management unit, CSE said: “While the COVID-19 caseload increased by a massive 234 percent between the first and second waves of the pandemic, COVID-19 biomedical waste generation went up by only 11 percent. The CPCB attributes this mismatch to better segregation of the waste, but our research points clearly to under-representation.”
Siddharth Ghanshyam Singh, deputy programme manager of CSE’s Solid Waste Management unit, said: “The challenge is to monitor the flow of COVID-19 waste. This waste has innumerable sources ranging from individual households to isolation centres and makeshift quarantine camps. Even though the Supreme Court made reporting through COVID19BWM app mandatory in July 2020, till December 2020, only 184 of the country’s 198 biomedical waste treatment facilities were updating their waste handling data on the app. By May, the number had dropped to 168.”
The report finds waste generators fare even worse on this account. In November 2020, 100,000 generators shared their information on the app. But in May 2021, when India accounted for almost half of the world’s new cases, only 5,084 generators had shared their data on the app.
“Such gross under-counting and under-reporting on COVID-19 is a matter of concern, especially because of the changing geography of the infection from urban to rural areas, where mechanisms to track patients in real time are almost non-existent,” says Biswas.
India has a biomedical waste treatment capacity of 826 tonnes per day, as per the CPCB. The assessment says this capacity is highly inadequate to handle a surge in Covid-19 cases, as was witnessed in September 2020 or May 2021.
During the pandemic’s second wave, 22 of India’s 35 states and Union territories generated more biomedical waste than they could handle. In May 2021, when India recorded the maximum number of new cases, Covid-19 accounted for 33 per cent of the biomedical waste generated across the country. This seems to have particularly overwhelmed an already-strained biomedical waste treatment infrastructure, notes the assessment.
The volumes were particularly massive in Haryana where Covid-19 waste made up 47 per cent of total biomedical waste, Himachal Pradesh 40 per cent, Delhi 39 per cent.
The massive vaccination drive that has been undertaken in India will add to the biomedical waste burden. “Every vaccine generates one waste syringe and needle and every 10-20 vaccinations generate one waste glass vial. They are biomedical waste that need to be disposed of carefully,” says Singh.
By the conclusion of the vaccination drive, which the Centre hopes to reach by the end of this year, the country would have generated over 1.3 billion used syringes and needles and more than 100 million discarded glass vials. “Do we have the capacity to deal with this huge mountain of Covid waste which is going to descend on us very soon?” asks Singh.
The assessment offers a few recommendations to remedy the situation: intensifying awareness among citizens to enforce segregation at source, ensuring registration of all waste generators and processors on the Covid-19 BWM app, limiting the use of PPE kits and other single-use paraphernalia to frontline workers only, and paying more attention to the rural hinterland where the virus has begun its depredation, among other things.
“While we are focused on prevention through measures like social distancing, use of masks, hand-washing and vaccination, we must not leave the backdoor ajar for the virus to spread through waste,”
Biswas said.
The statistics tell the tale — almost 20 per cent of the biomedical waste India generates on any given day since the pandemic’s first wave is Covid-19-related, says data collected by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) using the COVID19BWM app, designed to keep track of the waste generated due to the pandemic.
However, even this hefty percentage might be an under-representation, cautions the assessment. Atin Biswas, programme director, Solid Waste Management unit, CSE said: “While the COVID-19 caseload increased by a massive 234 percent between the first and second waves of the pandemic, COVID-19 biomedical waste generation went up by only 11 percent. The CPCB attributes this mismatch to better segregation of the waste, but our research points clearly to under-representation.”
Siddharth Ghanshyam Singh, deputy programme manager of CSE’s Solid Waste Management unit, said: “The challenge is to monitor the flow of COVID-19 waste. This waste has innumerable sources ranging from individual households to isolation centres and makeshift quarantine camps. Even though the Supreme Court made reporting through COVID19BWM app mandatory in July 2020, till December 2020, only 184 of the country’s 198 biomedical waste treatment facilities were updating their waste handling data on the app. By May, the number had dropped to 168.”
The report finds waste generators fare even worse on this account. In November 2020, 100,000 generators shared their information on the app. But in May 2021, when India accounted for almost half of the world’s new cases, only 5,084 generators had shared their data on the app.
“Such gross under-counting and under-reporting on COVID-19 is a matter of concern, especially because of the changing geography of the infection from urban to rural areas, where mechanisms to track patients in real time are almost non-existent,” says Biswas.
India has a biomedical waste treatment capacity of 826 tonnes per day, as per the CPCB. The assessment says this capacity is highly inadequate to handle a surge in Covid-19 cases, as was witnessed in September 2020 or May 2021.
During the pandemic’s second wave, 22 of India’s 35 states and Union territories generated more biomedical waste than they could handle. In May 2021, when India recorded the maximum number of new cases, Covid-19 accounted for 33 per cent of the biomedical waste generated across the country. This seems to have particularly overwhelmed an already-strained biomedical waste treatment infrastructure, notes the assessment.
The volumes were particularly massive in Haryana where Covid-19 waste made up 47 per cent of total biomedical waste, Himachal Pradesh 40 per cent, Delhi 39 per cent.
The massive vaccination drive that has been undertaken in India will add to the biomedical waste burden. “Every vaccine generates one waste syringe and needle and every 10-20 vaccinations generate one waste glass vial. They are biomedical waste that need to be disposed of carefully,” says Singh.
By the conclusion of the vaccination drive, which the Centre hopes to reach by the end of this year, the country would have generated over 1.3 billion used syringes and needles and more than 100 million discarded glass vials. “Do we have the capacity to deal with this huge mountain of Covid waste which is going to descend on us very soon?” asks Singh.
The assessment offers a few recommendations to remedy the situation: intensifying awareness among citizens to enforce segregation at source, ensuring registration of all waste generators and processors on the Covid-19 BWM app, limiting the use of PPE kits and other single-use paraphernalia to frontline workers only, and paying more attention to the rural hinterland where the virus has begun its depredation, among other things.
“While we are focused on prevention through measures like social distancing, use of masks, hand-washing and vaccination, we must not leave the backdoor ajar for the virus to spread through waste,”
Biswas said.
