With increasing number of people infected with Covid-19 globally, and huge increase in mask use, more virus contaminated hospital wastes is being produced and dumped in waste disposal sites. Many countries do not have environmental law regulations for the disposal of such wastes. How will it affect human health and infection, especially in rural areas?
Nucleic acid from SARS-CoV 2 can be amplified from samples collected in water waste. It's been used as a marker for community spread of COVID-19 by some researchers. So yes, there is SARS-CoV 2 in the environment. But to your point, whether the viruses recovered from those samples are live replication competent viruses is still not clear to me. It is possible that what's amplified during the RT-PCR is just RNA from dead viruses. Answering this question will require to isolate from the waste produced and grow SARS-CoV 2 in the proper cell culture systems.
I agree with Vincent Yapo .
While there certainly is the potential for environmental contamination, whether this plays a role in transmission is another question. How much virus is still viable by the time another host comes along is going to be a complex matter of chance and localized environmental conditions. I imagine this risk would be relatively low in most settings but perhaps not negligible in all settings. What animals may get infected and what risk those animals pose in transmission is also another valid question worth asking. Mink and some feline species certainly are susceptible in reverse-zoonoses events, although whether these influence zoonotic transmission seems less clear.
Vincent Yapo
Grant Whitman
Thank you so much for your valuable contribution. It was excellent.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Microbiology
- Virology
- Virus