Martin Fullard meets Abby Elliott, director, Sanondaf Hampshire South, to talk about venue hygiene now the reopening of the sector is in sight.
On 22 February, prime minister Boris Johnson gave England some hope when he said events could return as early as 21 June without restrictions, on the premise the virus doesn’t throw up anymore surprises. Add to that the continued successful roll-out of the vaccination programme, and it’s all starting to sound a bit rosier.
Yet, it stands to reason that the face of venue hygiene has changed forever. As the prime minister himself said in his address, we have to get rid of the idea of living in a “zero Covid world”. Covid-19 is here to stay, so mitigation will be etched firmly into the terms and conditions between venues and organisers for a while.
Abby Elliot began her working life in events. In 1997 she worked internally as an event organiser for Centaur Media. While there, Elliot organised a variety of events, including the Lawyer and Money Marketing Awards, plus multiple conferences and exhibitions for other Centaur publications. She then moved to AXA Life, where she was an internal communications project manager before moving agency side, eventually ending up at MCI UK where, she says, she spent “basically the rest of my career” in the events industry,
Elliot, then, knows her events industry onions. This means she is well-placed to talk to me about different methods of keeping venues healthier. She provides a venue disinfection service which targets the virus not only on surfaces but also in its deadliest, aerosol form. It’s called Sanondaf, a UK wide business, though she personally operates mostly in the Hampshire region.
The virus is transmissible through the air, and this is something venues will have to combat for a while to come, so how does it work?
We met over video call to discuss.
The experts say that the virus moves through the air, yet there seems to be a focus on cleaning surfaces; should we have a more aerosol view of things? Have we got this the wrong way around?
“It’s not the wrong way round, but it is only part of the story or part of the problem. I don’t think it’s incredibly hard to understand why we’ve gone through a learning journey with this. If you think back to March when the lockdown happened and Covid-19 was identified as a pandemic, the level of understanding about this virus was pretty minimal.
“If you think about the way the UK Government’s guidance on things seems to have changed direction so often, especially last year, it’s because the evidence about transmission just wasn’t available yet. So, there was an understandable reliance on what do we know from previous pandemics. What about previous viruses of a similar nature and how they transmit? If we think of the case of SARS and MERS, which come from the same Coronavirus family and are also respiratory viral infections, the evidence shows that they are transmitted via droplets, so close person to person contact and contamination of surfaces via droplets is an issue. It isn’t difficult to understand why that’s the way the medical and science experts initially thought we needed to approach things.
“By summer 2020 though, the evidence became apparent that actually the challenging nature of Covid-19 is how it transmits through aerosols, our breath. In fact there is a section of the scientific world that believe they have enough evidence to say transmission is more of a risk via aerosols than surface contamination. As the evidence has grown, been assessed and analysed, the understanding has been that we need to look at this differently.”