How To Stop Your Facility From Becoming A COVID-19 Hotspot

By Donald Markham


To date, the only thing certain about COVID-19 is that until a vaccine is produced and made available to the general public, the global pandemic, which has surpassed a 6-figure death toll in the U.S., isn’t going away any time soon.

All this despite the lifting of stay-at-home orders from states that are witnessing gradual declines of total new cases.

But while many businesses are welcoming the opportunity to fully reopen their doors again, the grave and present danger of sudden outbreaks is impossible to ignore, particularly for plants, warehouses, and distribution centers that employ hundreds or even thousands of workers in close quarters.

In these environments it’s likely for even a single case to spiral into a domino effect of new cases quickly and without remorse.

In fact, it’s already happened at dozens of plants that became major hotspots for the transmission of COVID-19, and can most certainly happen again, if not for the following safety measures that enable you to root out harmful cases and prevent the spread of COVID-19 at your facilities!

ADVANCED STRATEGIES FOR PREVENTING
COVID-19 AT YOUR FACILITIES

 

1. DISEASE SURVEILLANCE

 

 

Critical to helping you identify who could be infected with COVID-19 prior to gaining entry into your facilities, disease surveillance is a no-nonsense mitigation strategy that’s currently being employed at the highest levels.

Take the U.S. Army, for example:

To combat COVID-19, they have elected to screen the body temperature of personnel seeking access into their military facilities, using thermal imaging devices that don’t require any physical contact and can be operated safely at a distance of six to eight feet.

And since this screening process only takes a few seconds to complete, disease surveillance, via thermal imaging, has been shown to increase the flow of traffic into facilities while identifying common symptoms of infection that would otherwise be allowed spread.

 

2. HYGIENIC CLEARANCE 

 

 

Unquestionably effective in killing off germs and bacteria associated with COVID-19, hygiene of the hands is a preventive mitigation strategy without substitute.

The only issue is, however, that it’s not guaranteed people will sanitize their hands efficiently, or as often as they need, prior to gaining access into populated environments where infectious germs can spread easily through direct or indirect contact.

In this case, only clearance-based hygienic protocols—like the use of sanitation stations that operate seamlessly with point-of-entry systems—can provide facilities and operations specialists with a fail-safe mechanism for allowing untainted room access strictly to personnel who’ve enacted compliance by undergoing automated and secure hand sanitation procedures.

 

3. TOUCHLESS AUTOMATION

 

 

An extremely sanitary and convenient alternative to manually-operated point-of-entry and egress, touchless automation is an intelligent mitigation strategy that removes the need for physical contact with equipment that can readily transmit COVID-19.

And it couldn’t be easier to enforce, thanks to microwave motion sensors that eliminate possible points of contamination, using reliable wave-to-open or hands-free activation that can be triggered anywhere from 2 to 24 inches away across virtually every entrance of your facilities!

All things considered, what else can come close to keeping you and everyone you come into contact with protected than not having to place a single finger on commonly touched surfaces that accumulate viral pathogens non-stop while you work?