In the post-Covid-19 world, a lot of awareness has been brought to just how dirty and unsanitary people really are. The virus spread very quickly, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of individuals. A huge chunk of these deaths were inside nursing homes and residencies for the elderly. While the Covid-19 virus was especially deadly to older people, the quick transmission and subsequent investigations into nursing homes lead to the discovery of another reason for the quick spread of Covid-19 in nursing homes. Poor hygiene and uncleanliness was one of the biggest reasons for the quick transmissions and spread of the virus amongst the older population in these nursing and residential homes. In this article, we’ll talk about the problems many of these communities face and how commercial cleaning can help.
To start off, let’s talk about residencies made specifically for elderly, but majority healthy, individuals. As residents get older, they start to forget to do things that they used to do, such as keep up with hygiene and cleaning. Things that used to be easy can also get a lot harder, for example, disinfecting counter tops and door knobs might be too big of a task for an elderly individual to handle. They are still completely lucid and healthy, but they have minor problems with keeping up cleanliness that wouldn’t look like so much of a problem to outside observers. The problem is that since older people are more susceptible to viruses, they actually need to be doing a lot more cleaning than the average population. This can cause quite a problem for the elderly residents who already may struggle with perfect cleanliness. This is thought to be one of the contributing factors to the spread of the Covid-19 virus in these elderly residential areas. One way that these residentials areas can combat this is by hiring more commercial cleaners to come in and regularly clean common areas of the community.
In nursing homes, a lot more egregious unsanitary things take place. This is why Covid-19 spread much faster in nursing homes over residential areas for elderly people. Many of the staff at nursing homes are underpaid and overworked. While there are many employees of nursing homes who are wonderful and take great care of their patients, even a few poor caretakers can assist in the spread of disease. Many nursing homes have had problems with caretakers not properly cleaning areas the elderly had accidents on or dirtied. Caretakers have also been known to not switch gloves in between their elderly patients. This is a huge problem and leads to the massive spread of disease. In order to fix these problems, nursing homes need to hire good quality caretakers. Another big thing that could help prevent the spread of viruses and diseases is commercial cleaning. A commercial cleaning crew should be coming into a nursing home at least a couple times a week to fully disinfect every surface and keep the place clean.
After the Covid-19 scare of 2020, it is important that we move past this by upping our standards of sanitation, especially in regard to the elderly.