Downtown Magazine by Stacy Gittleman
National – Across the nation, schools, businesses, and office spaces are embroiled in what is known as “hygiene theater” to assure the public that indoor spaces are safe to return to work, learn, shop, exercise, and dine in once the pandemic ebbs. Back at the office, workspace experts are trying their best to implement guidelines from the CDC, repartitioning and reconfiguring layouts to maximize physical distancing of desks, installing plexiglass barriers, and posting one-way foot traffic signs around workstations. Some schools and businesses have deployed high-tech devices for temperature checks as the world figures out how to get back to a new, post-pandemic normal. But prolonged inactivity in all the buildings we normally occupy in day-to-day life has heightened the presence of another underlying hazard lurking in our man-made water systems that not even the CDC’s offices could evade: the presence of Legionella.