Fighting Coronavirus: How To Disinfect Your House? Here’s A Quick Guide

New Delhi: “At this given point, cleaning the house on a daily basis is simply not enough to prevent transmission of coronavirus. At this stage, to prevent the infection, sanitization along with few precautions for maintaining basic hygiene is very important,” says Dr. Deepak Verma, Internal Medicine, Columbia Asia Hospital, Ghaziabad as he explains about how to disinfect one’s house and make it safe from coronavirus.

The first thing we all need to understand is that cleaning and disinfecting are two very different things. As per Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, one should do a little bit of both at this crucial time of the pandemic. Cleaning is all about removing contaminants from a surface, which we all do daily in our houses. Whereas, disinfecting means killing pathogens or viruses on the surfaces. Even during the lockdown, we come in touch with the outside world in some or the other way – when you going out to get groceries or essentials or when someone delivers those to your house. Remember the person delivering is coming from outside. And that’s where disinfecting and cleaning your house plays an important role.

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This strain of the Coronavirus is known to survive on certain surfaces for days. Hence the role of disinfectants become important to keep the virus away.

Dr Deepak lists out the following key steps:

1. If you go out to buy anything, first and foremost, you should wipe or clean every item with sanitizer or soapy water. The main aim here is to clean anything coming from outside

2. Remove your shoes before entering the house, in fact, one should keep a separate pair of footwear for outside and for inside

3. Not just floors, clean high-touch surfaces (areas which are touched more in comparison to other areas) in the kitchen or washroom surfaces such as racks, basins, sinks at least twice a day. Use a diluted bleach product or those with an alcohol content of more than 70 per cent.

4. Most importantly, clean doorknobs, latches on doors and windows, switches, mobile phones and tabs twice a day with detergent-mixed water.

5. For cleaning surfaces, use a detergent or soap water and add a drop of any disinfectant

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Dr. Meenakshi Jain, Associate Director, Internal Medicine, Max hospital Patparganj explaining the importance of cleaning and disinfecting one’s house said,

Daily routine dusting is not enough, we all should properly sanitise our house at this point of time. Most important are the doorknobs, locks, handles and things we touch daily like mobile, remotes, tabletops, tv panels and other surfaces. Just keep disinfecting wipes, which have alcohol content up to 70 per cent, handy with you. For cleaning, bleach or sodium hypochlorite can also be used.

Given that the country cannot be under lockdown forever and increasingly there is a belief that we may have to live with the Sars-Cov2 for a long time, experts recommend that taking necessary precautions like social distancing, maintaining personal hygiene, using masks and disinfecting our immediate surroundings is perhaps the only way to stay safe from the infection.

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