Best Practices for Reopening Businesses

Reopening Businesses Starts Soon

The process of reopening businesses is starting soon. In some places – those least hit by the pandemic – cities have already started reopening businesses in hopes of speeding up economic recovery. A slow down in new cases doesn’t mean the virus has disappeared, however. Viruses are persistent and continue to exist even after the general public develops resistance or immunity. As we begin reopening businesses, it’s important that we still take precautions to maximize the safety of our employees and our customers.

Covid-19 Best Practices

The CDC has released plenty of guidelines for handling the virus.  Before reopening your business, they recommend that you have a plan. The most recent guidelines are specifically about reopening, but the main details have not overall changed.

1. Washing Hands

Soap is still the most effective weapon against viruses. Viruses are essentially fatty tissues encasing bits of RNA. They spread by injecting this RNA into a cell, which hijacks the cell’s reproduction functions to create more viruses. Soap dissolves the tissues that connect the virus’s main body to its injectors, though. If you wash your hands with warm water and soap, scrubbing for at least 30 seconds, it will render the virus inert. Even if it gets in your body, it cannot reproduce without those injectors, so your body will be able to identify it and develop antibodies to fight it.

It’s important to make sure that all of your employees wash their hands every time they touch another person, or a surface that others regularly touch. Wear gloves to avoid contact. This will help minimize the risk of infection. If you don’t have soap on hand, alcohol-based sanitizers can work as a replacement up to a point, but they are not as effective and require more scrubbing. Whatever you use, make sure you have enough to keep your employees and customers safe and healthy

2. Clean Surfaces

Alcohol-based cleaners will destroy viruses in the same way as soap, but they are slower acting and must sit for a longer time to be effective. Water also dilutes the alcohol. This makes it less effective for hand washing, but as a surface cleaner, it works just fine.

Using disinfectants, you need to regularly clean every surface that sees high contact. This includes door handles, desks, registers, conveyors in grocery stores, and furniture. Take not of what customers touch and mark them to be cleaned. You should spray these surfaces down with cleaner after every interaction with a customer or client. Once per hour, do a more thorough cleaning to make sure you get everything off.

3. Breathe Responsibly

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

We all need to breathe, which is why so many diseases use our respiratory system as an infection vector. By irritating our lungs and causing us to cough, they get a free ride from one person to the next. To avoid spreading an airborne disease, we need to take precautions.

The most obvious is wearing a cloth mask. Cloth masks catch the droplets of virus containing moisture we exhale. This isn’t guaranteed to stop all of the viruses from getting through, but it reduces the amount significantly. It also helps if you make sure you always cough into your shoulder. Coughing on your hands only makes you spread the virus to everything you touch and coughing into the air is . . . well, it’s just gross. By coughing into your shoulder, any viruses you may have will cling to a surface that people are unlikely to come into contact with. Viruses cannot survive very long without a host to infect, so they will most likely die off before they can infect anyone. The heat and soap from your laundry machines will likely kill what remains.

Keeping a distance of 6 feet or more will also significantly reduce the chances of spreading the disease.

4. Be Reasonable

If your employees are sick, or even just feeling a little under the weather, don’t force them to come in. We shouldn’t have to say this, but apparently we do. There is no good reason to force employees to come in if they suspect they have the virus. Customers will be slow to return, so there’s no need to over-staff and put people at risk.

If possible, arrange for and encourage employees to work from home. The internet is an amazing invention.  It allows for nearly anything computer related to be done remotely. If your employees can work from home, this is the best option. It won’t require your employees to risk their health in any way, but still allows them to get their work done.

5. Do A Full Cleaning

Before you fully reopen your business, it would be a good idea to do a full cleaning of your business building. Have a cleaning crew go through the entire building and clean every room, every surface, and every object. This will make sure your workers have a clean building to come back to. Note that this process will only make the office clean until someone with the virus contaminates it. For best results, it’s advisable to do a full cleaning once a week until the CDC gives the go-ahead to reopen normally.

Alpine Cleaning Can Do Business Clean-Up for Covid-19

Working with Utah Disaster Kleenup, Alpine Cleaning uses a certified 7-step process to systematically clean up offices and high-rises.  Our process insures cleaners can’t recontaminate cleaned areas after they’ve been disinfected. We strictly follow CDC guidelines for eliminating the virus, making sure your office or business will be fully cleaned once we leave.

If you’re about to reopen your business, get in touch with us today. We’ll have your office cleaned up and ready for you to reopen when the time comes.