As states reopen after the COVID-19 lockdown, you may be returning to your workplace. You’re probably taking general precautions to avoid catching coronavirus at the office, but you might encounter one potential source of trouble before you even enter your office: The elevator.
If you work on the first floor, consider yourself lucky—but what about if you have to get into that tiny, hardly-more-than-six-feet-wide box to reach your floor? Here’s what you can do to lower your likelihood of catching coronavirus, and what you can expect from your building maintenance to help keep you safe.
Here’s some good news: In an early release 2020 study published in Emerging Infectious Diseases focused on a COVID-19 outbreak in an office building in South Korea, the cases were mostly clustered among people who worked together on the 11th floor on one side of the building.
This is despite the fact that these employees came into contact with other people on different floors of the 19-story building (who shared the same elevators). Now, the researchers believe that since the spread of COVID-19 was mainly concentrated on the 11th floor, the risk for transmission is strongly contingent on the amount of time people interact or have contact with one another in a crowded, enclosed space, like a call center. In other words, a 30-to-60 second elevator ride with an infected person may pose less of a risk than spending eight-plus hours hanging around an infected person in the same office.