Quantitative evaluation of infectious health care wastes from numbers of confirmed, suspected and out-patients during COVID-19 pandemic: A case study of Wuhan

The fight against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is still running its courses. Proper management and disposal of health care wastes (HCWs) are critical to win the fight. To achieve aforementioned tasks, prediction of their production is highly desired. In this study, primary data of production of three kinds of HCWs collected from Wuhan, the first epidemic epicenter worldwide and a mega city with more than 10 million population who has went through a lockdown period of 78 days, were reported for their first time. HCWs were classified into routine HCWs, infectious HCWs (IHCWs) and infectious municipal solid wastes. Among them, infectious HCWs from designated hospitals for COVID-19 were recognized as the most dangerous one. A multiple linear regression (MLR) model was built to predict the production of IHCWs with high significance. Numbers of patients were demonstrated high correlations with the production of IHCWs in an order of confirmed patients ＞ out-patients ＞ suspected patients. By the MLR model, production rates of IHCWs by confirmed, suspected and out patients were determined as 3.2, 1.8 and 0.1 kg/patient, respectively. In addition, constant production of IHCWs during the pandemic period was determined as 13 tons/d. This is the first study on quantitative evaluation of infectious HCWs during COVID-19 pandemic. The achievements in this study have potentials to shed light on global efforts to the prediction, management and disposal of vast HCWs generated in the war against COVID-19.