Best Practices To Prevent COVID-19 At Your Facility

Medical experts are still researching and gathering all the facts about the new coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19. They can only be relying on past figures to determine how to tackle this new virus. Fortunately, based on historical coronaviruses with similar characteristics and following the interim guidance provided by the CDC and WHO, some guidelines can be used as the best practices to prevent COVID-19 at your facility.

When an employee at Singapore’s biggest bank, DBS, tested positive for COVID-19, the company immediately closed the affected areas for deep cleaning. They also advised employees based in the affected area to work from home for at least 14 days. Facebook also shut its London office, and part of its Singapore base for deep cleaning after one of their Singaporean employees was diagnosed with COVID-19.

People who work at this employee’s building and nearby offices will put in self-quarantine for 14 days as a precautionary measure. The office facilities with this airborne disease case will undergo professional cleaning and disinfection. There is no vaccine for COVID-19, but most people recovered. Preventive action, such as disinfection cleaning, is one of the best practices to prevent COVID-19 at your facility.

Washing your hands frequently and staying home (social distancing) if you are sick also can help prevent infection. Once an outbreak has occurred, and it becomes more challenging to track down suspected cases, social distancing measures like cancelling large events, working from home, and voluntarily avoiding crowded areas is vital.

Cleaning and Disinfecting

Scanning employees and visitors for temperature, deep cleaning, and disinfecting reduce the severity of business interruption by limiting the chance of these illnesses spreading among occupants while in the facility. Deep cleaning and disinfecting your facility is a crucial way to remove contaminants from buildings and helps to ease the minds of your employees and customers. Deep cleaning of surfaces before disinfecting is the correct way to decontaminate.

When someone who has COVID-19 coughs or sneezes, they release droplets of infected fluid. Most of these droplets fall on nearby surfaces and objects such as desks, tables, computers, or telephones. People could catch COVID-19 by touching the contaminated surfaces or objects and then touching their eyes, nose, or mouth. Adequately cleaned surfaces are the best practice to prevent COVID-19 at your facility.

Well used surfaces are the most obvious places to find germs, and by and large, these are covered in your standard cleaning plans and often cleaned to a standard. However, the hard to reach places or not so apparent hotspots that can be harbouring years’ worth of bacteria are always left unclean. The air conditioner or fans, photocopiers, doorknobs, water dispensers, light switches are items that are used daily, but we might not think to clean as often.

The CDC has directed businesses to rely on interim guidance for cleaning disinfection. The guidelines based on the past successful decontamination techniques used for previous strains of coronavirus. A professional cleaning company will be able to complete a cleaning audit to ensure they tackle all areas of concern. Atalian understands that your reputation is on the line, and your business is already suffering from this unprecedented event.

We offer a wide variety of preventive disinfection and decontamination services. Our well-trained professionals will help to limit the usual suspects in virus transmission and use the right cleaning products in the right scenarios. By implementing tablets with AMS applications to our onsite employees, we can process job site information quickly while in the field. To learn more about our pandemic disinfection cleaning services, click here.

Practicing Hands Hygiene

Minimizing the spread of germs depends on ensuring that your employees have access to adequate hand-washing facilities. Make sure your staff, contractors, and customers have access to places where they can wash their hands with soap and water. Well-stocked and regularly cleaned washrooms are essential to minimizing the spread of germs that can cause disease. Best practices to prevent Covid-19 at your facility include placing sanitizing hand rub dispensers in relevant places.

Thus, your employees can keep sanitized between washroom breaks. Make sure these dispensers are regularly refilled. It would be best if you displayed posters promoting hand-washing and hand-rubbing (find at www.WHO.int). Combine this with other communication measures such as offering guidance from occupational health and safety officers, briefings at meetings, and information on the intranet to promote hand-washing and hand rubbing.

Practicing Good Respiratory Hygiene

Good respiratory hygiene can prevent the spread of COVID-19 at your facility. You can display posters promoting respiratory hygiene. You also can combine this with other communication measures such as offering guidance from occupational health and safety officers, briefing at meetings, and information on the intranet. Provide face masks (ordinary surgical face masks rather than N95 face masks), and paper tissues are available at your facility for those who develop a runny nose or cough at work.

Also, prepare closed bins for hygienically disposing of the used face masks and paper tissues. If someone is standing within one meter of a person with COVID-19, they can catch it by breathing in droplets coughed out or exhaled by them. Items such as HVAC systems may need to be decontaminated to prevent people from contracting an infectious disease. Residual contaminants can travel through your HVAC system, where all air in the building is circulated and can contribute to the spread of an airborne virus.

Atalian provides duct cleaning services to improve indoor air quality at your facility. Set an appointment with us!

Social Distancing

Advice employees to consult national travel advice before going on business trips. Brief your employees, contractors, and customers that if COVID-19 starts spreading in your community, anyone with even a mild cough or low-grade fever (37.3 C or more) needs to stay at home. The sick employees must not come to work or work from home if they have had to take medications that may mask symptoms of infection.

Avoid sending employees who may be at higher risk of serious illness to areas where COVID-19 is spreading. Make sure all persons travelling to locations reporting COVID-19 are briefed by a qualified professional (e.g., staff health services or health care provider). Consider issuing employees who are about to travel with small bottles (under 100 CL) of alcohol-based hand rub to facilitate regular hand-rubbing.

While travelling, encourage employees to wash their hands regularly and stay at least one meter away from people who are coughing or sneezing. Ensure employees know what to do and whom to contact if they feel ill while travelling. Ensure that your employees comply with instructions from local authorities where they are visiting. If, for example, they are told by local authorities not to go somewhere or must avoid large gatherings, they should comply with this.

Employees who have returned from an area where COVID-19 is spreading should monitor themselves for symptoms for 14 days and take their temperature twice a day. If they develop even a mild cough or low-grade fever, they should stay at home and self-isolate (avoiding close contact one meter or nearer with other people). They should also call their healthcare provider or the local public health department, giving them details of their recent travel and symptoms.

There is a risk that people attending your meeting or event might be unwittingly bringing the COVID-19 virus to the meeting and might be unknowingly exposing others to the virus. While COVID-19 is a mild disease for most people, it can make some very ill based on their health condition. Consider whether teleconference or online events are possible. If not, try to scale down so that fewer people will attend.

Be ready with preparedness plans to prevent infection at your meeting or event. Ensure and verify information and communication channels in advance with key partners such as public health and health care authorities. Prepare tissues and hand sanitizer for all participants and surgical masks for anyone who develops respiratory symptoms. Advice participants in advance that if they have any signs or feel unwell, they should not attend.

Arrange seats so that participants are at least one meter apart. Open windows and doors whenever possible to make sure the venue is well ventilated. Please make sure everyone at the event provides contact details such as mobile telephone number, email, and address where they are staying. State them that they must agree to their details to be shared with local public health authorities if any participant becomes ill with suspected infectious disease.

If everyone plays their part to perfection, these best practices guidelines can be effective, and the pandemic outbreak can be tackled. Give us a call to learn more about the best practices to prevent Covid-19 at your facility.