The current pandemic has seen us become more focused on hygiene in our overall lives, but particularly in our working spaces. There have been more and more businesses looking at working with Contract Cleaning Cheltenham companies like biggreencleaning.co.uk to ensure that their work environments are as safe as they can possibly be. There are a number of viruses that can survive on surfaces for a number of hours and even days and these include Covid-19, Influenza and Norovirus. The most common viruses that appear to spread through infected surfaces are respiratory and stomach viruses. This is in part due to our human behaviour as it is thought that the average person will touch their face, nose and eyes around 16 times every hour and many of these will be completely subconscious.
There are some common areas where germs and viruses are more likely to spread, and these are also the locations where cleaning companies like the ones mentioned above will focus a lot of their cleaning work.
Desks – workspaces are the perfect environment for germs and viruses to thrive. Our hands are touching all elements on our desks, the computer keyboard, mouse and the telephone, time and time again throughout the day. This means that anything we have touched elsewhere in the office can become contaminated with germs from our desks and vice versa.
Door handles – this is probably the most obvious one. With probably hundreds of pairs of hands touching door handles throughout the day it is ino wonder that they are a hotbed for germs and viruses. This is particularly true of toilet door handles as a surprising number of people still do not wash their hands after using the toilet. This can often be where stomach bugs circulate.
Light switches – again similarly to door handles, light switches are turned on and off by multiple people. This is why automatic lights are becoming a popular solution for many office spaces. They are often motion activated which means when there is no activity in a space for a given period of time the lights will turn off. They can be reactivated with simple movement in the sensor area.
Coffee Machines – in a research study that was undertaken a harmless but detectable virus was given to one person who worked in an office environment. They monitored the spread of this and over time it spread to a further 80 people. The coffee machine and coffee pot handles were one of the first places that the virus spread to.
There are lots of other places that can become germ zones but these are the most common ones.