ArticleSustainable cities and society2021
On the Critical Role of Human Feces and Public Toilets in the Transmission of COVID-19: Evidence from China.
Article in Sustainable cities and society, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- A study on the siting of emergency medical facilities under uncertain demand-A case study of Wuhan country parks.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- The coming Omicron waves and factors affecting its spread after China reopening borders.BMC medical informatics and decision making · 2023Article
- Study on the spatial decomposition of the infection probability of COVID-19.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Modelling the reopen strategy from dynamic zero-COVID in China considering the sequela and reinfection.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The dynamics of early-stage transmission of COVID-19: A novel quantification of the role of global temperature.Gondwana research : international geoscience journal · 2023Article
- Ventilation reconstruction in bathrooms for restraining hazardous plume: Mitigate COVID-19 and beyond.Journal of hazardous materials · 2022Article
- Study on the mechanism of public attention to a major event: The outbreak of COVID-19 in China.Sustainable cities and society · 2022Article
- Dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 spreading under the influence of environmental factors and strategies to tackle the pandemic: A systematic review.Sustainable cities and society · 2022Review
- On male urination and related environmental disease transmission in restrooms: From the perspectives of fluid dynamics.Sustainable cities and society · 2022Article
- Forecasting COVID-19 new cases using deep learning methods.Computers in biology and medicine · 2022Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
The surprising spread speed of the COVID-19 pandemic creates an urgent need for investigating the transmission chain or transmission pattern of COVID-19 beyond the traditional respiratory channels. This study therefore examines whether human feces and public toilets play a critical role in the transmission of COVID-19. First, it develops a theoretical model that simulates the transmission chain of COVID-19 through public restrooms. Second, it uses stabilized epidemic data from China to empirically examine this theory, conducting an empirical estimation using a two-stage least squares (2SLS) model with appropriate instrumental variables (IVs). This study confirms that the wastewater directly promotes the transmission of COVID-19 within a city. However, the role of garbage in this transmission chain is more indirect in the sense that garbage has a complex relationship with public toilets, and it promotes the transmission of COVID-19 within a city through interaction with public toilets and, hence, human feces. These findings have very strong policy implications in the sense that if we can somehow use the ratio of public toilets as a policy instrument, then we can find a way to minimize the total number of infections in a region. As shown in this study, pushing the ratio of public toilets (against open defecation) to the local population in a city to its optimal level would help to reduce the total infection in a region.
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