Hazmat-suited workers poke plastic swabs down millions of throats in China each day, leaving bins bursting with medical waste that has become the environmental and economic levy of the nation’s “zero COVID-19” strategy.
China is the last major economy wedded to stamping out infections no matter the cost. Near-daily testing is the most commonly used weapon in an anti-virus arsenal that includes snap lockdowns and forced quarantines when just a few cases are detected.
From Beijing to Shanghai, Shenzhen to Tianjin, cities are now home to an archipelago of temporary testing kiosks, while authorities order hundreds of millions of people to get swabbed every two or three days.
Photo: AFP
Mass testing appears set to stay as Chinese authorities insist “zero COVID-19” has allowed the world’s most populous nation to avoid a public health catastrophe, but experts say the approach — a source of political legitimacy for the ruling Chinese Communist Party — creates a sea of hazardous waste and a mounting economic burden for local governments, who must plow tens of billions of dollars into funding the system.
“The sheer amount of medical waste that is being generated on a routine basis [is] at a scale that is practically unseen in human history,” said Li Yifei (李逸飛), an environmental studies expert at New York University Shanghai. “The problems are already becoming astronomical, and they will continue to grow even bigger.”
Beijing has positioned itself as an environmental leader, cracking down on air and water pollution while setting the goal of making its economy carbon neutral by 2060, a target experts say is untenable given the current trajectory of investments in coal.
Blanket-testing is now posing a new trash challenge.
Each positive case — typically a few dozen a day nationwide — unspools a trail of used test kits, masks and personal protective equipment.
If not disposed of properly, biomedical waste can contaminate soil and waterways, posing threats to the environment and human health.
Cities and provinces home to about 600 million people have announced some form of routine testing in recent weeks, according to an analysis of government notices and Chinese media reports.
Nationwide data on the waste footprint has not been disclosed, but Shanghai officials last month said that the city produced 68,500 tonnes of medical waste during its COVID-19 lockdown, with daily output up to six times higher than normal.
Under Chinese regulations, local authorities are tasked with separating, disinfecting, transporting and storing COVID-19 waste before finally disposing of it — usually by incineration — but disposal systems in the poorer rural parts of the nation have long been overburdened.
“I’m not sure that ... the countryside really has the capacity to deal with a significant increase in the amount of medical waste,” said Huang Yanzhong (黃嚴忠), a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The spike in waste might prompt some local governments to process it improperly or simply “dump it on the ground” in temporary landfills, said Benjamin Steuer of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
In a statement, the Chinese Ministry of Health and Welfare said that it had made “specific demands for medical waste management” as part of national COVID-19 protocols.
Beijing has urged provincial capitals and cities with at least 10 million people to set up a test site within 15 minutes’ walk of every resident.
Top leaders also expect local governments to foot the bill for testing at a time when many are struggling to balance the books.
Expanding the model to the whole of the nation could cost between 0.9 and 2.3 percent of China’s GDP, Nomura analysts said last month.
“The economics of that is tricky,” Li said. “You don’t want to invest in permanent infrastructure to process what is perceived as a short-term surge of medical waste.”
Jin Dong-yan (金冬雁), a professor at Hong Kong University’s School of Biomedical Sciences, said “very ineffective and costly” routine testing would force governments to back away from other much-needed healthcare investments.
Authorities are also likely to miss positive cases as the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 spreads rapidly and is harder to detect than other strains, he said.
“This will not work,” he said. “It will just wash down millions of dollars into the sea.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) removed former minister of foreign affairs Qin Gang (秦剛) from his post after an investigation concluded that he had conducted an affair and fathered a child while serving as ambassador to the US, the Wall Street Journal reported. Top officials were told in August that a CCP inquiry into Qin uncovered “lifestyle issues,” the newspaper reported yesterday, citing people familiar with the situation that it did not describe. That phrase usually means sexual misbehavior of some type in the parlance of Chinese officialdom. Two of the people said the affair led to the birth of a child in
GUNNED DOWN: The Canadian PM said there were credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey on June 18 India yesterday dismissed allegations that its government was linked to the killing of a Sikh activist in Canada as “absurd,” expelling a senior Canadian diplomat and accusing Canada of interfering in India’s internal affairs. It came a day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described what he called credible allegations that India was connected to the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an advocate of Sikh independence from India who was gunned down on June 18 outside a Sikh cultural center in Surrey, British Columbia, and Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat. “Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a
SECURITY: Wang met with the US national security adviser in Malta over the weekend, with the US side noting the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) yesterday headed to Russia for security talks after two days of meetings with US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan over the weekend in Malta. China’s top foreign policy official will be in Russia until Thursday for a round of China-Russia strategic security consultations, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a brief statement. The US and China are at odds over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China has refrained from taking sides in the war, saying that while a country’s territory must be respected, the West needs to consider Russia’s security concerns about NATO’s
LOST BATTLE: The Varroa mite, which Canberra has called the ‘most serious pest’ to face bees, would cause serious economic damage, an ecologist said Australia yesterday abandoned its fight to eradicate the destructive Varroa mite, an invasive parasite responsible for the collapse of honeybee populations across the planet. Desperate to keep Varroa out of the country, authorities have destroyed more than 14,000 infected beehives since the tiny red-brown pest was first detected north of Sydney in June last year. The government said its US$64 million eradication plan could not stop the mite from spreading, and the country’s beekeepers should now prepare to live with the incursion. “The recent spike in new detections have made it clear that the Varroa mite infestation is more widespread and has
RSS