Securing Your Home – Post Covid 19

As the world starts to return to normal, people are bound to question how they can secure their homes in a post covid-19 world. This type of security applies to health and well-being, not just locking doors against Intruders but against invading viruses or pathogens.  The CDC has home recommendations in a post covid 19 world that can keep you and anyone in your home much healthier and safer. But what does it entail?  

• Securing your home in a post covid-19 world means being more cognizant of what you clean and how you clean.
• It means keeping your shoes near the doors instead of tracking germs all the way through the house especially if you have carpet.
• It entails wiping down surfaces especially in the kitchen and the bathroom regularly.
• It applies to knowing when your hands need to be washed not just after activities but before activities.

In the Home

One of the biggest changes applies to the kitchen. Where most people might have gone to the grocery store and come home with bags of font bags of boxed or frozen products touched by hundreds of people over the course of the day without a second thought, now people are much more aware of the need to leave non-perishable groceries in the garage while they spray them down with a diluted mixture of bleach and water, or at the very least wash their hands after putting the groceries away and avoiding any eye contact or touching of the face until that time.

People are much more aware of infections and diseases that can come from handling food. While this was previously something people only focused on when they worked in a job that required it, now households are much more aware of the need to secure the home by washing hands before starting any activity in the kitchen, making sure that kitchen counters are clean.  Sanitizing kitchen counters is often something people do after they have prepared a meal or after they have cut raw chicken on a cutting board, but we so often forget that the counter is usually a place for purses or backpacks to be tossed when family members come home, or for bills and packages recently delivered on the front porch to be left. All of these things serve as opportunities for germs, especially the bottoms of backpacks, shopping bags, or purses which have spent most of their day in direct contact with the dirtiest surfaces around.

Hygiene of Locks and Digital Security Systems 

Once a residential locksmith installs a security system, it is up to you to keep it clean. One of the biggest problems with sanitizing any system is that people want a simple, single answer, a one-size-fits-all sanitizing solution so that they can make the most out of their time spent cleaning. Unfortunately, germs just don’t work this way.  To truly sanitize, you might be told that rubbing alcohol is an easy option for your home, much the same as hand sanitizer which is alcohol-based can be used in the car. While this does clean many germs, it doesn’t target any germs that are transferred through the oral fecal route. The oral fecal route is a term used by medical professionals to refer to any things that comes from fecal matter and gets transferred through the oral cavity, the mouth. These are viruses like norovirus or any type of diarrheal problems that come from people not washing their hands and then touching other surfaces or touching their face. Alcohol won’t kill these. 

• Soap and water will kill these so if you can’t control how many people are touching your home digital security systems, and you can’t force everyone to wash their hands, you can use soap and water to carefully wipe down the buttons on your digital systems or to sanitize the locks on your doors and windows. 
• If you aren’t comfortable with this, an even easier solution is to invest in UV sanitizers which come in the form of UV light wands that you hold over a specific surface to sanitize it. 
• Just make sure that when you are wanting your locks and digital security systems, that you keep the light on the system for long enough to kill the germs which is usually 20 to 30 seconds. 
• More importantly, you need to be careful about how you use this because while this will kill germs much more effectively, including those which are not killed by regular cleaning products like alcohol, the light has to be able to reach the affected surface so deep inside a lock or on the sides of the buttons for your digital security system, the light might not penetrate.