Preparing to Re-open Your Business After COVID-19

As states plan when and how they will re-open as the coronavirus pandemic wanes, many businesses are planning when and how to re-open as well. Key to re-opening is ensuring a safe working environment for your employees, visitors, and customers, which can be a daunting process considering how contagious the virus is and how quickly it spreads.

Before allowing employees and customers to come through your doors, you may want to consider a thorough deep cleaning of your space that disinfects surfaces and eradicates pathogens that may cause the virus. How is a disinfection conducted, and why is it important to conduct one at your facility?

Why you should clean before re-opening

If one thing is certain about COVID-19, it’s uncertainty. Even asymptomatic people can spread COVID-19, which can linger on many surface types for several days. Thus, businesses may do well to clean before re-opening for extra reassurance that no pathogens remain.

Even if your space has been empty for months due to the coronavirus pandemic, your employees, visitors and customers may still be hesitant to go about “business as usual,” especially in spaces that attract crowds or congregate hundreds of people. Businesses that can confidently tell customers and workers that extra precautions have been taken clearly demonstrate care for everyone’s health.

How deep cleaning is conducted

Deep cleaning performed with great care and attention to detail utilizes two methods: wiping and fogging. While they each have their own time and place, these methods often go hand in hand when deep cleaning a space.

Wiping is exactly as described — applying disinfectant to surfaces, letting them sit for the prescribed amount of time, and wiped down using the proper precautions to minimize the spread of contagions. Wiping is often used for sensitive surfaces such as electronics, and is also utilized for common touch points such as doorknobs, elevator buttons, and tabletops.

Fogging tackles the disinfecting of an entire space. To prepare a room for fogging, frequent touch points are wiped down, including sensitive surfaces such as electronics. After wiping, those sensitive items are wrapped in protective layers of plastic wrap. During fogging, a decontaminating gas is dispersed throughout an entire space, both enclosed and open. This method ensures that all surfaces are equally touched by the disinfectant, since gases expand to fit the shape of the room, permeating materials and fitting into many small crevices.

If there are suspected or confirmed cases of COVID-19 at your facility, the wiping and fogging procedures will be shaped by when and where the person with the suspected case spent time. The right decontamination service will trace the person’s movements and ensure that all frequented areas are cleaned. If the person used a specific entrance or spent a lot of time in the break room, for example, those places would be of focus during the deep cleaning. For such exhaustive and attentive deep cleaning, only an environmental remediation service can be trusted.

Partner with EWMA for a thorough, safe deep cleaning

As the world shifts into a “new normal,” your business might require a deep cleaning before re-opening its doors. In fact, you may even want to consider regular disinfection of any commercial space as a way to reassure returning employees and customers that their safety and well-being are taken seriously. Partnering with EWMA means that these cleanings are conducted as carefully and painstakingly as a detailed environmental remediation, whether you do them once or make them a monthly occurrence.

EWMA has three decades of environmental remediation experience and a stellar track record of adhering to standards required of rigorous, highly-regulated remediation projects. EWMA’s in-house experts are fully versed in local, state, and federal agency guidelines for safe and thorough mitigation, expertise that’s applied directly to disinfection and deep cleaning of sites that may be contaminated with the pathogen that causes the COVID-19 disease.

If your commercial space requires a safe, thorough deep cleaning before re-opening to the public, call 973-703-6659 and ask for Michael Sylvester or Craig Gorczyca to obtain a no-cost, no-obligation estimate.