FAR WEST TEXAS — When a Presidio County employee came down with a case of COVID-19, Judge Cinderela Guevara already knew who she was going to call: the Virus Busters. As offices, retail shops, grocery stores and restaurants grapple with community spread, professional sanitization has become one key to fighting the virus and keeping the business open.
Guevara had hired the company to clean at the county’s polling places during the primary runoff elections this July, and worked with them to institute a plan for if, or when, an outbreak hit the county offices. Within five weeks of designating a plan, it was set into motion when an employee that had been in both the courthouse and the annex tested positive for COVID-19.
The hallways, restrooms and public spaces were all sprayed in the three-story courthouse and in the annex. The tax office was also cleaned, since the infection had impacted an employee there. “Due to the constant, continuous public patronage that heavily flows through there on a daily basis, it seemed wise to make every attempt to nip that culprit at its roots,” Guevara said.
The small Virus Busters operation began this spring as a division of Alpine Pest Control, when owner Phil Westerman began watching the coronavirus news coming out of China. Westerman has worked in pest mitigation for over 40 years in the area, but when the virus was emerging on the other side of the world, he saw what would become a growing need for virus mitigation.
Westerman knew about electrostatic misting from his early days in the business, when he would use the equipment in commercial food plants. “I just did some research and said, ‘Hell, I’ll buy my own equipment. I invested a couple hundred dollars, talked to chemical suppliers and figured out what we needed to do and how to do it,” he said.
The sanitation operation was tied into Westerman’s pest control liability insurance, and he was already licensed by the state to apply chemicals. With a few hundred dollars of newly purchased equipment, Virus Busters took off, providing sanitation to businesses already impacted by coronavirus or to companies looking to get ahead of it and prevent the contraction of the disease.
By August, the two-man operation – Westerman and a colleague, Manny Ybarra – had cleaned Alpine ISD schools, True Value, a handful of local restaurants, the Presidio County Courthouse and its annex in Presidio.
Forever West Texas Realty started giving free cleanings when buyers closed on a home, and local grocery chain Porter’s hired the pair to clean their stores in Alpine, Presidio, Marfa and Fort Davis twice a week, preemptively hoping to prevent any viral spread at their stores. “They really care about their customers,” Westerman remarked.
The speedy response by the county is exactly what Dr. JP Schwartz, the county’s public health authority, looks for when businesses discover a positive case in their ranks. “What should happen is when the employee lets the business know they tested positive, the business should respond immediately and close immediately and do the disinfectant and get all their employees tested,” he said. The employee should quarantine until they get results back.
While Schwartz noted that some businesses have failed to close for sanitizing, the health authority pointed to Stripes as one example of a good response. When an employee came down with coronavirus last week, their corporate offices intervened, sending impacted employees home, bringing in their own in-house sanitization team and filled in shifts using other Stripes employees from around the area who had tested negative.
When Ybarra and Westerman arrive at a job site, they are armed with gloves, masks and other personal protective equipment. Then the pair get to work. “We electrostatically mist. It’s kind of like fogging, but it’s a mist,” Westerman explained.
Electrostatic misting equipment applies an electrostatic charge to the cleaning mist, which then clings to objects. The method is especially good for applying cleaner to uneven surfaces and has the added benefit of taking much less time than wiping down individual objects in a room. For the Virus Busters, their misting relies on a virucide that kills 29 different types of viruses, according to Westerman.
Dr. Schwartz said bringing in surface-cleaning services like those provided by Virus Busters is the correct response to COVID-19 outbreaks. And even though there is evidence the virus may persist in the air through fine, aerosolized droplets, he said treating the air is “not always super safe, especially in food businesses because you could contaminate the food itself.”
“It’s one tool in the battle against COVID,” Westerman said of his company’s service. “It’s still real important to wear masks, wash your hands all the time and social distance, but there’s no cure-all – if there was, I’d be rich.”