Due to outbreak of COVID-19 throughout the world, individual hygiene has got tremendous importance as no such medicine has yet been invented by scientists to kill the virus. It is understood and well accepted fact that maintenance of individual hygiene and social distancing are the only way to combat the virus. Governments of different countries declared complete lockdown to arrest the spread of Corona virus. However, in the unlocking phase, people become scare to go to offices, factories, shops and other public places for getting infected by Corona virus. So, community hygienic i.e. keeping public places clean and germ free is getting more `priority in the people’s mind beside individual hygiene.
After prolonged lockdown of about more than 2 months in India, government has taken the policy of unlock the country by starting all kinds of economic activities in phased manner. So, there must be a clean and hygienic environment in the society overall so that people may not be affected by Covid virus due to dirty environment. As such all private, public establishments have taken the initiative of sanitizing offices, factories, shops, market and other establishments on periodical basis so that people may feel safe in going outside home for livelihood purposes.
I was present during a complete sanitisation programme of an office and try to capture few pictures so as to understand how it becomes an important routine work of an office. It seems to me that Covid-19 virus has brought a new culture of keeping us clean across the society. The concept of cleanliness has spread all sections of masses irrespective of socio-economic classes.
When I reached an office, I found trained staff wearing personal protective equipments (PPE) are sanitizing entire rooms, corridor, stair case, wash rooms and every corner of the building by using sodium hypochlorite. Similarly all furniture, door handles, computers and its accessories, copier machines and other electronic devices are also sanitized by using another chemical namely Alstakol 256. It took about 3 hours to sanitise around 55000 sq. ft. of office space by 6 personnel. As sanitizing is a continuous process, so a single day sanitization is not enough to keep the office clean forever. As I asked, they told me that full sanitization at least once in a week is a must if the office is not crowded by large numbers of visitors on regular basis. So, sanitization becomes a part of the essential job in present time. This is what we learn from Covid-19 virus.
