Assessment of the awareness about COVID-19 and the following-up of guidelines for biomedical wastes in Jaipur city

Abstract

In this COVID-19 era, isolating people and reviewing their contacts has proven to be insufficient to control the COVID-19 pandemic as there was a huge gap between exposure to the virus and isolation due to the late onset of symptoms. This led to the spread of infection and people faced the consequences not only of viral infection, but also of financial and occupational crises. People followed best management practices, however, new variants emerged that caused infection. With little information on new COVID-19 variants and their transmission, the disease spread rapidly in humans. Until now, the link between the spread of COVID-19 and the disposal of biomedical waste with household waste has not been established. Therefore, the only way to prevent infection is to make people aware. It is still necessary to open the doors for research to find the possible cause of the appearance of a new variant of COVID-19. To cope with the situation, the level of awareness among the public and their action towards the prevention of spread of infection caused by COVID-19 and its emerging variants must be known. Therefore, a survey was conducted in Jaipur from January to February 2022 to find out the status of awareness. Results of the survey revealed that both people are aware about the infection caused by COVID-19 and its variants. They are also aware about the precautions to be followed to protect themselves from acquiring COVID-19 infection. Most of the people are using masks but not gloves to prevent themselves from the infection. Merely, 71.6% of young, 100% of adults, 40% of old people sanitize their masks and gloves before disposal. Only 66.5% people are using separate bags for the collection of wastes. Despite of awareness about biomedical waste, 25% of young never sanitize, and 26.13% of young seldom sanitizes their waste before disposal. Such types of cases were not observed in adults and old age groups. Similarly, 2.3% of young did not sanitize PPE kit prior to disposal. Results of this study revealed that there is awareness about the different strains of corona virus and biomedical wastes. However, some people showed casual behaviour in the waste disposal practices. The strict implementation of rules to dispose biomedical waste will be useful for dealing with biomedical waste in this pandemic period.