Risk Management, Communication and Healthcare Waste Management During the Covid-19 Pandemic: Addressing the Information Gap

This paper posits that current Covid-19 safety protocols propagated by leading public health agencies including the World Health Organization (WHO), United States Centres for Disease Control (USCDC) as well as the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) largely neglects the issue of healthcare waste. This creates an information gap which can have serious public health ramifications especially, for countries in the global south. To date, the Coronavirus has infected close to half a billion people worldwide, resulting in more than 6 million fatalities (WHO, 2022). A significant number of infections and fatalities have been recorded in the global south where in addition to providing care for infected patients, massive testing and vaccination programs aimed at curbing the spread of the virus have been rolled out. Such activities, contributes to generating massive volumes of healthcare waste including potentially infectious needles, syringes, masks, gloves, blood products and bodily fluids. The mismanagement of such waste in this era of Covid-19 is highly antithetical to curbing the spread of the virus. Abridging the information gap requires a robust risk communication strategy that prioritizes healthcare waste management as an essential nonpharmaceutical intervention in the fight against Covid-19.