Over the last few weeks, essential businesses have been adapting to this new normal, particularly with their health and safety practices. Ranging from warehouses, retail stores, and supermarkets to property managers getting ahead of the game for people’s return to offices, disinfection is on everyone’s mind.
Whether your facility sees routine and effective disinfection as an immediate need following a COVID-19 diagnosis, or a necessary step in preparation for the future, it’s crucial to have a reliable solution.
Start with a plan
In these uncharted waters, you need a routine or standard for how your facility is going to operate safely. Consider the need for cleanliness and the continued health of your employees as the priorities for your “biosecurity plan.” These measures, much like typical security, are designed to keep unwanted individuals out. In this case, the individuals are a contagious and invisible enemy, which makes strengthening your biosecurity even more critical.
In fact, your facility already has a biosecurity plan in place: requiring employees to wash their hands after using the restroom. This is a common measure that usually does the job, but these times call for a doubling or tripling down on hygiene and disinfection practices. A recent article from Neogen expertly breaks down effective biosecurity into three steps:
- Bioexclusion, or keeping pathogens out of the facility.
- Biomitigation, or limiting the spread of pathogens within the facility.
- Biocontainment, or keeping pathogens from leaving the facility.
If you’re an essential business, then bioexclusion is incredibly challenging to manage. Employees have to come to work, assuming they are feeling healthy. You have no control over what they could come in contact with outside of your facility. Continuing to emphasize the requirement of washing hands with soap for at least 20 seconds is just a start. With COVID-19, there is a greater need to invest more into employee health to keep those who are sick at home. It’s the only way to prevent a broader spread in your facility, as well as your community.
Biomitigation, on the other hand, requires an active fight against potential contamination. Cleaning of common surface areas, such as equipment, door handles, tables, and phones, doesn’t always complete the job. You need to consider whether you’re dealing with a hard or soft surface to clean them appropriately. Instead of opting for a standard disinfectant, you need to find a solution that disinfects while providing continued protection. If possible, you need to enforce the practice of social distancing and limit unnecessary interactions.
With biocontainment, you’re supporting the previous two steps with more considerable attention to detail. It’s not far off from what doctors and nurses have to do with their personal protection equipment after a shift. By containing any potential contamination to your facility, you can ensure that employees don’t go home and spread the virus among their families or housemates. The best practices would be for employees to sanitize or change into a different set of clothes before leaving.
High risks, heavy-duty solutions
Once you have a plan in place, you can set out to find the right solutions to support it. While we are an on-demand car care company, we’re well-equipped to help disinfect and continually protect facilities as well. As we’ve previously discussed, the EPA-approved, CDC-recommended chemicals we use to fight COVID-19 on vehicle hard and soft surfaces are effective anywhere.
Since they are designed for hospital-grade disinfection, we’re capable of treating facilities for general sanitization needs as well as those with known infections. Each treatment focus comes with a slightly different process. General disinfection follows CDC guidelines for high-touch surfaces with our hard and soft surface products. Facilities with known infections are subject to a more highly concentrated product, applied via fogger.
We’ve already had several clients choose to destroy the virus in their facilities and supplement it with regular disinfectant services to prevent reinfection. While it may seem like overkill, at least compared to how we were operating a few months ago, it’s now required to combat this resilient disease. Promoting the continued well-being of your employees and staying on top of your facility’s cleanliness is one of the best strategies for success right now.
If you want to proactively protect your facility or disinfect in response to an infection, then we’re here to help. Click below to learn more and reach out.
Posted in Facilities, Disinfection
