Disinfection & Its Integration Into Daily Lives
Importance of disinfection and its integration in our dailyl lives post COVID-19
Even after a year of the novel coronavirus outbreak, the virus remains a pressing and major concern for our country. Human lives have changed drastically over the past year in all aspect. Be it stepping out of the house to run a simple errand or travelling to a different location for work or leisure. No action performed by us remains the same as we fight this deadly virus. The post COVID-19 world is a constant reminder of all that has and should change.
A crucial and defining change in the post COVID world is sanitization and disinfection of ourselves, our surroundings, and our houses among everything else. The norms of cleaning and disinfecting have changed drastically. What we accepted as a clean surface or object can no longer suffice. In the current scenario, cleaning our homes and surroundings every day is not enough to ensure complete safety and prevent the transmission of the virus. We need to sanitize and disinfect along with incorporating certain precautions for guaranteeing basic hygiene. These precautions include the use of practicing social distancing, using face masks and hand sanitizers when outside or in the company of people.
Non-healthcare settings need regular disinfection as well, to reduce the potential for COVID-19 virus contamination. High touch surfaces and areas need to be identified and prioritized for extra care. While the virus is known to be fragile, reports suggest that it does have a tendency to persist on both porous and non-porous hard surfaces, from minutes to hours, increasing the opportunity for it to transfer from hand to body and therefore increase the risk of infection. However, it has been noted that the lipids that coat the genetic material of the virus are easy to disrupt, so sanitizing surfaces can easily kill the virus. We must choose the right sanitizing product based on where it is used, how and how often the product is applied, and how often the people coming in contact with the surface need to wash their hands.
We also need to stress on the difference between cleaning and disinfecting. While cleaning refers to the removal of contaminants from surfaces, disinfecting involves the killing of pathogens and viruses present on the surface. Both of these need to be practiced and incorporated as we move on to lead our lives in the post COVID world.
A few ways you can start disinfecting your surroundings and maintain the hygiene around you include:
- Making use of disinfection devices to clean high contact surfaces. These are highly effective and help kill the pathogens and viruses present in your homes.
- Washing and sanitizing each and every product or object that might have been exposed to the outside setting.
- Make use of surface appropriate disinfectant wipes or sprays.
- On returning home, immediately heading to take a bath and washing the clothes you wore so that any residual virus or pathogen on your body and clothes gets washed away.
- Ensuring the use of hand sanitizers and regular hand wash for a minimum of 20 seconds for every member of the family.
