The Unexpected Consequences of COVID-19

9/23/2020 (Permalink)

Aren't you sick of seeing this molecule everywhere?

It’s become a cliché to say that COVID-19 changed everything, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

We’ve seen major changes, like businesses closing, schools shutting down, hospitals struggling to keep up with demand and many people more or less locked down in their homes for the past six months.

With these changes come all kinds of unexpected consequences. With businesses closing or cutting back staff, we saw gas prices plummet. With the rise of virtual learning, we saw the death of the snow day. With hospitals struggling to keep up with patient care, we saw the American manufacturing community pull together to produce ventilators, PPE and other necessities that were previously made overseas.

As a business owner, it’s vital that you do everything you can to prepare for the unexpected. Otherwise, the consequences could be brutal.

Imagine, for example, that you’re the manager of a large building. Another company leases space in your building and operates a food court. According to the state’s mandates, most of your tenants have sent their employees to work from home or else furloughed them until they could come back to work.

Seeing that, you make the wise decision to ask the food court to shut down for the time being. You just don’t need the added risk of their employees congregating in your building when there’s really no demand for what they’re serving.

Great decision! Except – if you’ve evacuated the food court, who is checking on their space? And we don’t mean just walking through every once in a while. Is someone really going in on a regular basis and ensuring there aren’t any issues?

If the answer is no, you could be in trouble. Imagine that the condenser on the food court’s enormous walk-in freezer breaks. Unless someone is performing routine checks on everything in the space, you aren’t going to find out until you have a huge, pungent biohazard on your hands from all the spoiled food.

And that huge biohazard? Really, it’s the result of COVID-19. Workers had to quickly evacuate their workplaces without knowing how long they’d be gone. It’s only natural that some things fell through the cracks.

How can you prepare for the unexpected like this? While there’s no way to ensure that nothing ever goes wrong, you can still make a plan. At SERVPRO of West Seneca/Lancaster, we call it the Emergency Ready Profile, or ERP.

ERPs are totally free, no-cost assessments of your facility designed to collect the information you need to prepare for the unexpected. Want more information? Click here – we’ll be in touch.