Quite a lot has been said recently about the pandemic-related challenges facing multi-family dwellings across America as they figure out how to successfully and properly address COVID-19 safety concerns for the tenants and staff.
This presents several important questions for boards of directors and management companies: What do you need to implement? How do you create and sustain a healthy indoor environment? And how do you minimize the costs for the both capital reserve expenses and the operating budget?
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) recommend intensifying both air sanitization and surface disinfection practices. In addition, the CDC has offered guidance suggesting buildings will need to dramatically improve their process for screening visitors and staff as they enter buildings to identify potential COVID-19 carriers. Recent research by Harvard indicates that a small increase in long-term exposure to COVID-19 particle matter leads to an increase in the COVID-19 death rate; and proper monitoring of indoor air can help track those harmful pollutants in real time.
At its most basic level, your building’s HVAC system has a wide variety of both mechanical and electronic equipment designed around a core set of parameters, such as the building’s location, typical local weather patterns, number of people inhabiting it, and regional outdoor air quality.
MEASURE
But these HVAC systems are simply not equipped to handle the air purification standards that your building needs to operate in a COVID-19 world. Your current HVAC system cannot eliminate all of those microscopic aerosol particles that consist of viruses, bacteria and other pathogens that continue to circulate throughout the ventilation systems of your building, possibly carrying and spreading COVID-19 throughout every room and hallway.
SANITATION AND PROTECTION The Center for Disease Control (CDC) has compelling research
showing COVID-19 can be spread by person-to-person contact, touching contaminated surfaces, and through airborne particles circulating in the airstream. This means it is critical to disinfect surfaces (like desks, drinking fountains, door handles, etc.) but also to purify the air inside your building’s common areas.
SCREENING PROCEDURES MANAGE
If your building is sanitized and safe, you must also deploy measures to help keep COVID-19 from entering. That requires at least the temperature screening of visitors, facility, staff, and outside vendors. To effectively screen each and every person coming to your building - and doing it every day - becomes a massive challenge when you consider the shortage of no-touch thermometers, the need to conserve resources, and the necessity to protect staff from exposure.
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