The growing number of people in Pattaya claiming to have COVID-19, or the number of people claiming not to have it, but are being forced into isolation units anyway, is generating a huge amount of infectious waste.
This is adding to the general garbage disposal problems already facing the seaside city.
Deputy mayor Manoj Nongyai, who is in charge of the city’s environment office, said on Tuesday that before the Covid-19 pandemic, Pattaya had to handle about 800 kilogrammes of infectious waste each day.
That had now increased to 7-8 tonnes per day, including infectious waste from hospitals, hospitels and community isolation centres.
He didn’t manage to explain how he had not been able to resolve that issue inside 18-MONTHS.
The company with the contract for garbage collection and disposal said it was not able to handle such an excessive quantity of infectious waste.
To solve the problem, the deputy mayor said the company had been told, ‘well in that case just start handling it all then.’
And with that, the mayor’s job appears to be done for the day. Problem solved. Pass the grilled lobster this way and send the bill to my wife’s cousin.
The city administration had also trained and assigned employees to assist the company with the handling of infectious waste, which must be destroyed within seven days and not left laying on the pavements for two-weeks.
In an exhibition of forward-thinking Manoj explained that as the number of new Covid-19 infections continued to rise the amount of infectious waste was also likely to increase. The man is a genius.
He also insisted that Covid-infected people staying in community isolation centres should put their infectious waste in red bags, so it could be easily sorted for disposal.
