COVID-19 hospital waste

“Where do they all go?”

Amid the surging daily COVID-19 cases nationwide, and with health workers being traumatized and overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases, one thing bothers me: Where do hospitals dispose of their highly-infectious wastes?

I know that big private hospitals in Metro Manila are equipped with waste disposal equipment that turn highly-infectious hospital waste into non-infectious wastes.

What about the smaller ones?

I ask this question since landfills outside Metro Manila have long been banned from accepting trash from Metro Manila. I can only recall many years ago when a scandal broke regarding hospital waste that was being dumped somewhere in Pampanga in a big vacant and unoccupied land.

I cannot imagine where all the infectious hospital wastes generated from COVID-19 pandemic cases are now being dumped. This is the job of Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources Roy Cimatu. May I ask him where? Last I heard, they were being dumped somewhere in Rizal province.

Garbage disposal has always been a problem for the environment mainly because scavengers make a living going through them.

In highly industrialized countries like the United States and Europe, and in Japan, waste disposal is not a problem. There  are highly mechanized garbage trucks and a centralized garbage place that takes care of the problem. But, in Metro Manila and other cities, where? It’s worse in other places.

While hospital waste is mainly the concern of the DENR, I believe the Department of Interior and Local Government should also be involved. Likewise, it is also the problem of the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA).

In other words, hospital waste is a multi-agency concern.

**

The 1Sambayan coalition supposedly aimed at uniting the opposition candidates for the 2022 local and national polls is faced with a bigger problem than its convenors had expected.

Not only are opposition candidates totally disunited, but efforts to make, for instance opposition presidential candidate, Vice President Leni Robredo, Senator Manny Pacquiao and Manila Mayor Isko Moreno have been rendered impossible. Santa Banana, can the three presidential candidates unite when they seem to be dead serious in their bid for the presidency?

As late as today, the 1Sambayan convenors are finding much difficulty in forming its local and national slates. I have stated from the start that its plan was doomed.

First of all, under what party can they unite when opposition candidates already have their own party?  Second, how could there be unity among the opposition candidates since all of the candidates want to head the supposed Unity Party?

Recall that in the United States polls, all the Democrats that challenged Donald Trump’s presidential bid showed good  sense in uniting under one candidate – Joe Biden.

With many challengers to the administration, it would be a walk in the park for the Sara-Bongbong tandem in the 2022 polls.

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There is definitely something wrong in the response of the government to the COVID-19 pandemic.

I am no health expert, but I see that the vaccine rollout is not as fast as expected. I don’t know if the short supply of vaccines is due to the lack of funds or something. How can the country achieve herd immunity by the end of the year at the rate vaccines are coming in?

My gulay, another problem as I see it is the procurement process of vaccines by the private sector. It is further slowed down by the imposition of restrictions by local government units.

There is also the bias and prejudice of people against the Chinese Sinovac which appears to be favored by the Duterte administration.

Health experts have also criticized the attempts of the Inter-Agency Task Force to experiment on restrictions and health protocols by creating “granular” lockdowns and Alerts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. These confuse the people.

Now they are thinking of resuming face-to-face classes. Santa Banana, isn’t it too soon?

There seems to be no roadmap for the government response to the crisis.

The Philippines now ranks 8th among countries with the most COVID-19 cases in the past 28 days, according to a global trace of Johns Hopkins University Medicine based in Maryland, USA.

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The Comelec should rule, once and for all, on which faction is legal in the PDP-Laban.

Will it be the Pacquiao faction or the Cusi faction? This should clear the air considering the fact that Senator Pacquiao has already made his bid for the presidency final.

The Comelec ruling is important because a candidate has to  run under a party. If Pacquiao doesn’t run under PDP-Laban, what then?