Lake City, Colo., March 23, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Been told to shelter in place? Most people catch COVID-19 from family members, and the home bathroom is literally a petri dish of infectious opportunity.
To start, most bathrooms are small, intimate spaces. The good news is that they’ve typically got hard, washable surfaces that can be cleaned with a bleach solution or other disinfectant.
The bad news is that it’s where we do the business of being sick: diarrhea, vomiting, nose blowing, you get the idea. Every surface, from sink handles to shower faucets to tile shower walls, is a potential hot zone, along with fabric and vinyl shower curtains.
To make matters worse, each time you flush an uncovered toilet, you to blast disease causing particles into the air as an aerosol. Tests have shown that this can happen for days after just one use of the toilet, and airborne particles tested have included norovirus, influenza and more. You can be certain coronavirus will easily become airborne.
Another issue particular to COVID-19 is that it has been shown to survive for hours, even days on clothes and hair. If you have towels, bathrobes or hand towels stacked in the bathroom, the virus can settle on them and stay there.
The point is to try to cool down this hot zone as much as possible. Here’s how to do the best you can with the technology that’s available, and a few behavioral adjustments. I’ll start with the easy adjustments, and move up from there:
Do your best to make your bathroom unfriendly to coronavirus, and the same protocol will help you avoid the flu and other less dangerous infections in coming years. Good luck.--Matt Power, Editor-in-Chief, Green Builder magazine.
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Green Builder Media is releasing articles and other information to help people shelter in place as safely and comfortably as possible. Visit www.greenbuildermedia.com and sign up for the free Vantage newsletter on the home page to access home-related COVID-19 information.
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Green Builder Media is the nation’s leading media company focused on green building and sustainable living, serving more than 200,000 progressive building professionals and millions of consumers who are interested in sustainable living. With a comprehensive suite of content marketing, digital, social, and print media options, high-profile demonstration projects, market intelligence and data services, and live events, Green Builder Media offers a blend of visionary and practical information covering a broad spectrum of topics, including building science, Internet of Things, smart home technologies, building and energy codes, intelligent water, indoor air quality, resilient housing, renewables and clean transportation. The company recently launched COGNITION Smart Data, a pioneering data services offering that combines artificial intelligence technology with user-specific metadata to achieve comprehensive, proprietary market insights.
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