The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has demonstrated both positive and negative effects on the environment. Major concerns over personal hygiene, mandated and ease in lockdown actions and slackening of some policy measures have led to a massive surge in the use of disposable personal protective equipment (PPE) and other single-use plastic items. This generated an enormous amount of plastic waste from both healthcare and household units, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Apart from the healthcare workers, the general public have become accustomed to using PPE. These habits are threatening the land and marine environment with immense loads of plastic waste, due to improper disposal practices across the world, especially in developing nations. Contaminated PPE has already made its way to the oceans which will inevitably produce plastic particles alongside other pathogen-driven diseases. This study provided an estimation-based approach in quantifying the amount of contaminated plastic waste that can be expected daily from the massive usage of PPE (e.g. facemasks) because of the countrywide mandated regulations on PPE usage. The situation of Bangladesh has been analysed and projections revealed that a total of 3.4 billion pieces of single-use facemask, hand sanitizer bottles, hand gloves and disposable polyethylene bags will be produced monthly, which will give rise to 472.30 t of disposable plastic waste per day. The equations provided for the quantification of waste from used single-use plastic and PPE can be used for other countries for rough estimations. Then, the discussed recommendations will help concerned authorities and policy makers to design effective response plans. Sustainable plastic waste management for the current and post-pandemic period can be imagined and acted upon.
Healthcare is one of the basic needs for human beings. Unfortunately, a densely populated country like Bangladesh has always struggled to provide adequate healthcare to all of its people, especially to the rural population. To handle with huge amount of data and coordination between the doctors and patients, electronic health record system (EHR) has become a necessity. During this Covid-19 pandemic, face to face consultation between frontline workers like doctors, and nurse and patients has become difficult. As a result, many patients are having difficulty in getting treatment from doctors. In Bangladesh’s perspective at this moment, a cost effective, energy efficient and portable device system is needed to build up a customized Electronic health record system. The proposed system can reduce medical errors about patient identification and treatment, increase effectiveness and timeliness of doctors and overall improve the health care of people of the rural area. Therefore, an easy to use, affordable, user-friendly E customized EHR system design is proposed in this paper by utilizing recent wireless communication techniques that will give the rural people better health service.
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