Keeping Facilities Safe During Viral Outbreaks

Facility and plant management professionals have a responsibility to their employees and guests to prepare and protect them against the COVID-19 and other viral and bacterial outbreaks in the United States. One of the most important steps that a facility can take amidst the COVID-19 and other outbreaks is to prepare both formal policies and practices as well as communicate early and often with facility and guests. Preparation builds resiliency and is the best prevention method for preventing the spread of the virus amongst employees and visitors.

The COVID-19 virus, formerly identified as 2019-nCoV, was identified as a novel coronavirus not previously seen by public health officials. Despite the commonality of coronaviruses throughout the world and their tendency to cause mild to moderate illness, the World Health Organization has declared the outbreak of COVID-19 as a public health emergency and international concern.[1]

Implementing "common sense" policies regarding personal hygiene and sanitation best practices have shown to have immediate and lasting effects on reducing the spread of the virus. Goodway technologies have taken a variety of steps to play our part in keeping employees safe and mitigating the spread of the virus to others. 

[1] https://www.ecolab.com/pages/coronavirus

The Covid-19 virus is spread primarily from person-to-person and travels through respiratory droplets that are produced from the mouth or nose when a person coughs or sneezes. The dwell time of these infected respiratory molecules is short, but when they reach the mouth, nose, or eyes of another person, they commonly transmit the virus.

Not all viruses spread as quickly as easily as others; for example, the Measles is a virus that spreads exceptionally quickly. The virus that causes COVID-19 is currently able to spread rapidly and consistently throughout the community, in a spreading method called community spread. Community spread means that people are often infected by the virus, seemingly just because they are in an area where the virus infects another person.[2]

Community spread often results in people getting affected by the illness without being entirely sure how or why they were infected. The ability of the COVID-19 virus to spread through community spread makes the virus a significant risk to people when they are carrying on about their everyday lives and moving between different crowded areas and groups. Large facilities and businesses are particularly at risk of community spread due to the size of the employee population and the number of visitors, vendors, etc.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/transmission.html

As the COVID-19 outbreak spreads across the United States, it is important for facilities and plants to plan, prepare, and take preventative action now to reduce the potential for spread across the community. The following are five steps that a facility can take now to both prepare their community for the outbreak and even to slow or stop its spreading.

1. Review, update and implement emergency operations plans (EOPs). Emergency operations plans are the standardized fallbacks and drills that facilities plan to enact in the occurrence of significant risk to the facility or its personnel. These emergency operations plans can be either a strict policy or a flexible emergency template for a facility to use to react. Ether way, EOPs are an essential, emergency fall back that should be verified and even enacted in the face of growing COVID-19 virus risk.
2. Communicate sick policies and the need for "self-quarantine" if employees show symptoms of infection.
3. Establish procedures for employees who are sick (with any illness). Essential personnel should be identified, but in the case of any person experiencing flu-like symptoms, there needs to be a method to get them into self-isolation or quarantine.
4. Perform routine environmental cleaning. Environmental cleaning measures should already be in place at the facility and in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, it may be necessary to increase the frequency and intensity of the maintenance and cleaning plan.
5. Create plans to communicate accurate and timely information to your employees - and if need be your local government. In the event of a large exposure to at your facility, including your local government in the mitigation response can help reduce the risk of further exposure to your local community.