Hello fellow Kossacks. It’s been a long time since I’ve written a dairy here, but with every day the news cycle is somehow even stupider than the day before, I figured it’s time for some not-stupid.
I’m a project manager for a company that does some pretty scary jobs- environmental clean up, bio-hazards, mold remediations, heavy metal contamination… and infection control. My resume reads like something out of a nightmare actually. So I’ll share here some things from my experience and professional training that hopefully can help.
Decontamination
I never tell anyone that my crew has disinfected anything. You can’t really prove that unless samples are taken and analyzed in a lab. And even then, as soon as someone opens the door, walks in the room and sneezes… Instead I say that we’ve “applied disinfectant.”
That said- the most critical part of the process is high touch surfaces. Things like door knobs, light switches, keyboards and touch-pads, faucet handles, drawer handles, etc. Our hands are how we interact with the world after all. So we want to focus our initial cleaning in these areas and move out from there. Several passes are usually required before these surfaces can be said to be fully clean.
Many products are available that can be effective disinfecting agents. The grifting moron currently occupying the WH hasn’t completely gutted the government yet, and someone at the EPA has posted a really helpful list. List N. That guy better watch his ass, because that’s actually really helpful. You can check that list for disinfectants and their effectiveness with COVID-19.
This is a video I saw in one of my certification classes. It’s from the Nebraska Antimicrobial Stewardship Assessment and Promotion Program. I’d recommend taking a gander, as it does a pretty good job of explaining high-touch areas and how to apply disinfectants.
Engineering Controls
What if someone in your household tests positive? Well fuck! That is less than ideal. We need to legitimately quarantine that poor soul and try our level best not to cross-contaminate the unaffected areas of the house. I will go through what we do to set up engineering controls when we get called in to do infection control jobs below…
Step 1- do not panic. It’s okay to be scared. In fact all of us should be scared. I’ve told my crew in training that if they aren’t scared, I don’t want them anywhere near me. Because that would signal that they aren’t taking this seriously enough, just like these booger-eating assholes. (Don’t eat your boogers, btw. Kinda like touching your face).
Step 2- isolate the poor soul. If they’ve been told that hospitalization isn’t required, of course. Definitely have the infected person wear a mask (duh). Make sure they’re comfortable and have access to a bathroom. Stay out of that area and clean the unaffected areas like you’ve never cleaned anything before in your life.
Step 3- airflow. Ideally, you want the room the person is in to be under negative air pressure. This is what hospitals do. The simplest way to achieve this is to close the door, open a window and place a fan in the window blowing out. When we do these jobs, we chamber off the area with 4 or 6 mil plastic and tape, sealing it off. We then use HEPA air scrubbers (pictured above) to manipulate the flow of air, creating negative air pressure in the affected rooms (we exhaust the air scrubbers out doors using ducting). We can also create positive air pressure outside the affected area to try to limit cross-contamination.
A few more thoughts about that- if possible, setting up a decontamination chamber is ideal. An area directly outside of the patient’s room, but away from the unaffected areas of the house. Dishes, laundry, etc. can be placed in the decon chamber to be thoroughly cleaned before they are removed (laundry is bagged, the bags are cleaned, etc.). You probably want to positively pressurize this area if possible and have it closed off from the rest of the house. Also (and this is important), if your house has a forced-air HVAC system, it is critical that the return (the intake) be kept unaffected. Change the filter(s) and keep that area as clean as possible to prevent cross-contamination in the duct-work.
Learning from history
Finally, I want to leave on something I think is crucial to our situation. I’m kinda tired of reading that our predicament is “unprecedented.” It’s not. Well, maybe in the sense that we’ve never had an American president quite as fucking stupid as the one we’ve got now… The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920 ravaged the world population. Here is a link to an excellent video from The Great War Youtube channel that briefly discusses it. I’d highly recommend a gander.
The really scary part about that is this: the first wave of the Spanish Flu hit in March 1918 and it was bad. But the second wave that came the following autumn was absolutely devastating. These fuckwads that are protesting the quarantine need to learn from history. We cannot afford the level of devastation that happened in September and October of 1918.
That’s all I got for today, hopefully this helped. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions, and I’ll try to reply. Stay safe out there!
