Although apartment buildings don’t face the same COVID-19 challenges as retail stores, they still have to deal with hundreds of residents coming and going every day. Public health and safety is everybody’s concern, and keeping commonly-touched surfaces as sanitary as possible is in everybody’s best interest. Here’s five reasons why sanitizing door mats should be part of your apartment building’s health safety strategy:
1. The floor often gets forgotten.
The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently conducted a study in March 2020 on the transmission vectors of COVID-19 in hospital wards in Wuhan, China. The study found that the coronavirus was widely distributed on floors throughout the hospital, even in areas that did not have direct contact with infected patients. Gravity and air flow cause most virus droplets to float to the ground, where they can be picked up by shoes and carried to new areas. Although a hospital setting isn’t the same as an apartment building, the chance of contagion is still very real – especially so if residents accidentally step on saliva or spit coming from a sick person while out in public. Many studies have also discovered that more than 90 per cent of shoe soles carry high levels of disease-carrying microbes – not just COVID-19.
2. Reduces the chance of re-contamination.
Most building operators have increased their sanitation regimes to combat the spread of COVID-19. They’re disinfecting their door handles, elevator panels, elevator call buttons, mailboxes, laundry rooms, and other common area surfaces that might be harbouring the coronavirus. But all that hard work could be for nothing if you don’t also treat areas inside your building that have been forgotten, like your floors! Using a sanitizing door mat system at your building’s access points helps to ‘close the loop’ and make sure that all touchpoints – not just hand touchpoints – are properly treated.
3. Inexpensive to own and easy to operate.
Sanitizing mat systems don’t need to be an expensive investment or a hassle to operate in your apartment building. Complete sanitizing mat systems like Grizzly Sanitize can be purchased for only a few hundred dollars, and effectively block off one potential ingress route for the coronavirus into your building. And the actual operation of a sanitizing mat system is simple too – your residents simply step, squish, and stride into your building! The actual sanitizing action happens as the sanitizer solution dwells and dries on shoe bottoms, killing the virus hitchhikers hiding inside their shoe soles.
4. Gives your building good optics to your residents.
It’s one thing to tell people that you’ve stepped up your cleaning regime within your apartment building, but it’s an entirely different thing to actually show them what you’re doing differently. Deploying a sanitizing mat system at all of your building’s entrances is a highly-effective way to prove that you genuinely care for the health of your residents. And taking action to keep your building sanitary isn’t strictly altruistic – nobody wants their apartment building to become the epicentre of a new outbreak of COVID-19!
5. Grizzly Sanitize can be repurposed after the pandemic is over.
While the use of sanitizing mats is really important right now, most buildings won’t need to use them when the world goes back to normal. Unlike most competing open-tray style sanitizing mat systems made of rubber, Grizzly Sanitize is still 100% useful after the pandemic is over! Grizzly Sanitize mats are made from the same high-performance Grizzly FX material as our entrance mats – which means that they’re ready to stop dirt and water at your front doors once the pandemic ends!