CHENNAI: People usually associate biomedical waste with hospitals and other healthcare facilities. With the coronavirus infection showing no sign of abatement, even the used masks that we unmindfully throw into dustbins can be highly infectious.
According to estimates by the Chennai Corporation, the city has been producing a daily average of five-tonne biomedical waste since the lockdown started.
The figure includes solid waste from quarantined houses which too is classified as biomedical waste.
On April 11, the civic body issued a public advisory asking the residents of non-quarantined houses to disinfect their used masks and gloves with an ordinary bleach solution and wrap them separately before handing them over to sanitary workers.
Sanitary workers, however, narrated a different tale. They lamented that people usually leave the used masks unwrapped in garbage bins. They are worried after as many as 10 among them have contracted COVID-19 so far.
“On rare occasions, I find masks wrapped in newspaper but even then I don’t think they are disinfected,” said a sanitary worker in Injambakkam.
Speaking to Express, Ashwin Karuppan, a city-based infectious diseases specialist said that used masks are infectious waste.
“Any mask used without changing for four hours becomes moist and has more contaminants than usual. It is extremely dangerous for sanitary workers to pick up these masks,” he said.
Corporation officials said that those going inside containment zones are being provided disposable protective suit. However, sanitary workers outside containment zones have to make do with masks, gloves and an overall. They bathe only after going home at the end of the day.
P Srinivasulu, general secretary of the Red Flag Union for conservancy workers said, “Although sanitary workers in central and southern zones are not engaged in segregating waste during the pandemic, workers in the northern zones continue to do so. All sanitary workers go for door to door collection which can exposes them to the virus.”
A senior corporation official said that they make sure that the sanitary workers are fully protected.
