Coronavirus News: Eyewitness News gets inside look at company hired to clean after COVID-19 diagnoses

Kristin Thorne Image
Friday, March 13, 2020
EWN gets inside look at company that cleans after COVID-19 diagnoses
Kristin Thorne has more on the agency hired to clean after coronavirus diagnoses.

HOLTSVILLE, Long Island (WABC) -- If the coronavirus is the enemy, Doug Baruchin and his workers at disinfecting company, ITS Environmental Services, based out of Holtsville, are on the front lines of the battle.

"The phone just keeps ringing with questions and questions. The emails keep coming in," Baruchin told Eyewitness News reporter Kristin Thorne who visited his warehouse on North Ocean Avenue Thursday.

Baruchin is usually called in to clean up crime scenes. But now, it's restaurants, office buildings and schools.

"It's all about having the right tools and getting this done very quickly for people because that's what they want, they want to open back up," he said.

Baruchin showed Eyewitness News the weapons in his disinfecting arsenal, which include an electrostatic sprayer. The sprayers make sure the disinfectants coat every nook and cranny of a surface by adding a negative charge to the chemical that's attracted to surfaces at a pull of 75 times stronger than gravity.

His workers also use a fogger which sprays a disinfectant throughout a large area.

"This is like having an extra man. I love this guy," Baruchin said of the machine. "We can turn him on, put him in a room up to 10,000 cubic feet set him off and let him do his thing while we go out and work other areas."

Baruchin says the coronavirus is, fortunately, a weak enemy thanks to a thin outer membrane.

"Once that's comprised - it's dead," Baruchin explained.

Baruchin showed us the layers upon layers of protective gear his workers wear at a job, including a powered air purifying respirator. He said workers typically suit up inside a building, not outside.

"A lot of building owners don't want to have that stigma, 'Oh, there's coronavirus here,'" he said.

Before workers leave a building, they spray down their suits with disinfectants as well.

The last step when doing a coronavirus job, Baruchin explained, entails testing different sorts of surfaces to make sure the germs have been eliminated.

Baruchin's workers swab an area and then run the swab through a machine which tests for living organisms.

Baruchin said there's also a little bit of therapy in this line of work.

"We have to calm people down," he said. "They feel a lot better when we're done."

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