Protecting Your House After a Family Member Has COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted and evolved many times over since 2020. However, the practice of sanitising and disinfecting your home after you or a family member has been infected is still essential. 

While Government and health experts agree that most people are safe to isolate and recover from COVID-19 at home, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that symptomatic individuals should use as few rooms as possible to quarantine. This ensures that the virus does not spread to others within the household. After the quarantine period, cleaning and disinfecting your household is the best practice for preventing further infection within your household. 

For households where total separation is possible, it is best that the infected person be confined to one bedroom and bathroom and ensure everyone else uses other rooms. If the dedication of rooms is not possible, other household members and caregivers need to wait as long as possible before entering it to disinfect the rooms. 

If full separation is impossible, all shared ‘high-touch’ surfaces should be regularly disinfected. These include light switches, counters, tables, and taps. Wearing masks, using personal protective equipment, like masks and gloves, and discarding objects like used tissues in separate bins is highly recommended. 

Assistant Professor Erica Marie Hamman at Northwest University, in Washington, who specialises in indoor microbiology claims that time is the best tool for ensuring the a home is completely free of infection when paired with appropriate, high quality disinfectant chemicals. 

Certified disinfection products are a fundamental part of the cleaning process. Melissa Bronstein, Director of infection prevention and control for Rochester Regional Health in New York says that “the products we consider effective against flu virus or for many other organisms have also obtained [COVID-19] certification.”

Bronstein also asks the community to be weary of natural cleaning products as many products don’t have certification or are not considered high-quality because they have been heavily diluted. Natural disinfecting agents, like vinegar, are far too weak to properly disinfect any surface.

Proper air ventilation is another essential aspect of preventing the spread of infection in your home. Colleen McLaughlin, an Associate Professor of Epidemiology with the Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in New York, states that good air circulation will clear a virus out of the immediate air and help weaken any virus particles in droplets on household surfaces. 

Bronstein notes that the pandemic has given everyone “a new appreciation for the importance of good air quality, you want to make sure the area is well-ventilated.”

Whether the goal is to protect your family from COVID-19 or other highly contagious viruses and bacteria like the Flu, using high quality disinfectant wipes, hand sanitisers, and air purifiers is imperative for infection prevention.