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Medical wastewater originating from hospitals specializing in infectious diseases pose a major risk to human and environmental health during pandemics. However, there have been few systematic studies on the management of this type of wastewater management. The function of the Huoshenshan Hospital as a designated emergency field hospital for the treatment of COVID-19 has provided lessons for the management measures of medical wastewater, mainly including: (1) Modern information technology, management schemes, and related standard systems provided the legislative foundation for emergency management of medical wastewater. (2) The three-tier prevention and control medical wastewater management system ensured the discharged wastewater met water quality standards, especially for the leak-proof sealed collection system of the first tier, and the biological and chemical treatment technology of the second tier. (3) The establishment of an effective three-tier medical wastewater quality monitoring accountability system. This system was particularly relevant for ensuring continuous data monitoring and dynamic analysis of characteristic indicators. (4) Information disclosure by government and public supervision promoted successful implementation of medical wastewater management and control measures. Public questionnaires (n = 212) further confirmed the effectiveness of information disclosure. The results of this study can act as methodological reference for the emergency management of wastewater in designated infectious disease hospitals under similar situations. Full article

The global outbreak of COVID-19 has caused worrying concern amongst the public and health authorities. The first and foremost problem that many countries face during the outbreak is a shortage of medical resources. In order to investigate the impact of a shortage of hospital beds on the COVID-19 outbreak, we formulated a piecewise smooth model for describing the limitation of hospital beds. We parameterized the model while using data on the cumulative numbers of confirmed cases, recovered cases, and deaths in Wuhan city from 10 January to 12 April 2020. The results showed that, even with strong prevention and control measures in Wuhan, slowing down the supply rate, reducing the maximum capacity, and delaying the supply time of hospital beds all aggravated the outbreak severity by magnifying the cumulative numbers of confirmed cases and deaths, lengthening the end time of the pandemic, enlarging the value of the effective reproduction number during the outbreak, and postponing the time when the threshold value was reduced to 1. Our results demonstrated that establishment of the Huoshenshan, Leishenshan, and Fangcang shelter hospitals avoided 22,786 people from being infected and saved 6524 lives. Furthermore, the intervention of supplying hospital beds avoided infections in 362,360 people and saved the lives of 274,591 persons. This confirmed that the quick establishment of the Huoshenshan, Leishenshan Hospitals, and Fangcang shelter hospitals, and the designation of other hospitals for COVID-19 patients played important roles in containing the outbreak in Wuhan. Full article

The outbreak of COVID-19 resulted in severe pressure on the existing medical infrastructure in China. Several Chinese cities began to construct temporary hospitals for the centralized treatment of COVID-19 patients. The harmful exhaust air from the outlets of these hospitals may have a significant adverse impact on the fresh-air intakes and surrounding environment. Owing to the need to rapidly construct these hospitals within 6–10 days, just a few hours are allowed for the analysis of the impact of this exhaust air on the environment. To overcome this difficulty, a high-efficiency simulation framework is proposed in this study. Based on the open-source computational fluid dynamics software, FDS, the proposed framework is adaptive and incorporates building information with different levels of detail during various design phases of the hospital, and has been applied in the design of the Wuhan Huoshenshan Hospital, the first typical COVID-19 temporary hospital in China. According to the simulation results, neither the fresh-air intakes nor the surrounding buildings would be polluted by the harmful air discharged from the air outlets of the Huoshenshan hospital. The proposed simulation framework can provide a reference for the design and overall planning of similar hospitals in China and other affected countries. Full article