Global view
Politicians are fond of talking about the “new normal”. While such statements , and many of the people who make them, are to be treated with a degree of scepticism, it does indeed seem that the post-Covid world is close to some form of normal. The question for our industry is how that “new normal” should be approached.
Infection prevention has been on the radar of all laundry facilities in the last 4 years. Mainly triggered by the arms race between the COVID 19 virus and the human immune system. This – after 4 years – resulted in a situation where vaccines and infections rebuild or better strengthened our defence. system. At the same time the new variants have become more and more contagious but luckily also less dangerous. The dominant variant in Q1 2024 is known as JN1 or Juno.
Several Infection Preventionists already predicted that the Covid 19 Virus would – in the end – mutate to a less virulent variant. And eventually not more dangerous than what we see in a yearly flu season.
Current situation / CDC
At the beginning of this year [2024] the WHO recorded 173.000 hospital admissions and 1900 admissions in Intensive Care Unit [ICU] over a four week period. These are very low figures when compared with the peak of the Covid 19 pandemic. The CDC [Centres for Disease Control and Prevention] maintained the recommendation to stay at home for five days after the first day of detection. But now two states in the USA have abandoned the isolation rule. Like the CDC, Oregon and California still advise infected people to mask indoors in public and stay away for at least 10 days from individuals who are at high risk of illness. But otherwise, both states say individuals with symptoms can venture into the public once they have been free of fever for at least 24 hours.
Implications for the laundry industry?
For the laundry : staff members that have signs of a Covid 19 infection might be recommended to stay home for at least 5 days. Especially when there are colleagues with a known lower level of immune defence.
But is it really business as usual ? It doesn’t look like. What has been striking to see is that the global number of respiratory illness activity has been rising substantially. Not only flu, but also other impressive numbers of virus infections have been registered in the aftermath of Covid. such as RSV and human metapneumovirus.
And there are people that quote statistics to prove that global outbreak can only be expected once in a decade. And a serious pandemic once in a century. But statistics over the past ten years do not take into account those factors that can trigger a next pandemic faster than expected. These factors are the trend of people moving into dense populated cities. Not to mention intensifying livestock farming and the ever increasing [air] travel.
All of this should make the laundry industry aware of their responsibility to maintain the highest possible level of hygiene. Not only in the wash process itself , but also in the complete supply chain to the end users.
A walk through the next chapters will reveal the challenges for each and every customer group that can be found in the global laundry industry:
Chapter 2: Hospital linen
Chapter 3: Hospitality industry
Chapter 4: Care Homes
Chapter 5 : Work wear industry – with focus on food industry garments
