72 hour "quarantining" of goods

[RaspberryCoulis]

I am a charity shop volunteer and when we finally reopened in July after the first lockdown what really hit us hard was the recommendation by the Charity Retail Association to quarantine all donations for 72 hours. As we have very limited space in the shop it meant we could only accept a fraction of what people wanted to give us.

Given that there is no evidence at all that you can pick covid up off second hand clothes and books, is it too much to hope for that we'll reopen in May as per usual? I don't think I can bear another X number of months of trying to explain to donors and customers when I think the rules are batshit crazy.

I suppose it makes no difference if you think the rules are batshit crazy. You still need to follow them to keep others safe. Don't you need to sort through and clean any donated goods anyway? (And there is plenty of evidence covid exists on surfaces.)

Could you link the evidence that shows covid exists in a transmissible state on surfaces please @TheClaws

I don’t think anyone seriously thinks this is now a risk so hopefully that rule will be relaxed

The science has been developing on this issue.

This is very recent one: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7706414/

The paper concludes COVID is likely to survive on surfaces for up to two or more days unless cleaned thoroughly with the right agents.

That being said, different surfaces don't harbour the virus in the same manner. Most clothing and fabrics simply require a high-temperature wash with disinfectant.

www.webmd.com/lung/how-long-covid-19-lives-on-surfaces

I work for a charity (not a charity shop) and accept donations of a specific item. We have been and will continue to quarantine items for 72 hours. I personally don’t think its worth the risk when there are ways to do this without too much effort.
It is likely that managers will have done a risk assessment and will be bound by the guidelines being given by the charity. Its been so long and all the signs are positive that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, we need to keep up all the Covid safe guidelines and not risk it all going wrong.

It's one of the major chains, and the manager doesn't have the power to make the decision. The decision about whether to quarantine, or not, is made on a national level.

Yes clothes are steamed before they are put out to sell, but we don't clean/wipe everything else - things which look grubby are cleaned up if it's worth it, glass or jewellery always looks better after a polish.

I know people have been banging on for a year about contamination from surfaces but I health professionals aren't recommending bleaching your shopping or quarantining deliveries. I also don't think that "covid can be detected on a surface" is not nearly the same thing as "covid on a surface could infect you or make you ill".

The requirement makes life really difficult for us, having to limit donations, stack stuff up for 3 days before touching it. We were closed end of March - end of July last year, and again in November for a month, and then closed again on Christmas Eve and won't reopen until probably the beginning of May.

A quick google brings up a number of articles with a rough guide to how long the virus survives on surfaces. For a shop selling to the public it would seem to be just good sense to quarantine items for a few days rather than risk any transmission, even if that transmission risk is slim.

It's just another massive barrier to us getting back to anything like normal. Limit the number of people in the shop, tell people who want to give us stuff that they have to make an appointment or they can't make a donation. The whole sector has been hammered with this, even last September/October when we were open, our takings were way way down.

Even though it can survive on surfaces, recent research is showing there is minimal chance of transmission that way.

www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4

The quarantining process doesn’t make any sense, anyway, people will be touching the clothes throughout the day as they are looking at them. If people are concerned, they will need to wash their hands after touching your goods, whether they have been quarantined or not.

@Thebookswereherfriends

A quick google brings up a number of articles with a rough guide to how long the virus survives on surfaces. For a shop selling to the public it would seem to be just good sense to quarantine items for a few days rather than risk any transmission, even if that transmission risk is slim.

But Tescos etc don't quarantine goods before putting them out for sale. I appreciate charity shop donations are coming from people's houses, but surely the risk is minimal?

Charity shop donations from.my house will have already been quarantined as they tend to spend a few weeks in the boot of my car before I remember to drop them off somewhere....

I know, @ThePricklySheep. But the chain appears particularly cautious. When all the other shops abandoned the counting people in and out in about August, we still had to have a volunteer on the door limiting numbers - rather than allowing people to enter freely and make their own decisions about social distancing.

To be fair - when the kids went back to school in August, they had a rule too that any homework handed in would be quarantined for 72 hours, then marked, then quarantined for another 72 hours before being handed back to the child. That was swiftly dropped after it became apparent that nobody was getting covid from their history book. So it's not just charity retail with silly rules.

Going back into the shop is going to be depressing enough - we closed on Christmas Eve, the paid staff were furloughed and nobody's set a foot in the store since. The unsold Christmas cards, decorations and gifts are still on the shelves. Hangers full of woolly winter jumpers and heavy coats. When we finally get the go-ahead to reopen it's going to be a massive job to get the shop into any state for opening, and we have no summer clothing stock as we were closed so long last year... The saddest thing of it all is that the end result is less money for the people the charity supports.

Makes a lot more sense for people to just wash/gel their hands before and after being in the shop, which most people do anyway. When you work in a normal retail shop (boots, tesco, clarks etc) they don't have to quarantine deliveries even though the drivers or packers have touched them. And they don't have to quarantine every item which is touched by a customer and then not purchased. Quarantine of donations makes no sense.

Also once you (the staff) have handled them to be put on the shelves, logically wouldn't they have to be quarantined again? And then again every time a customer touches that item. Its just stupid. Almost as stupid as one way systems which actually bring people closer and/or make it impossible to access some parts of the shop.

I'm hoping they do away with this rule in libraries too. Our library has been closed for browsing for over a year, no good for young children

I agree with you that it seems unlikely for transmission, but I think the rule will stay in place for months if not all year.

Can you suggest to your manager / head office advertising and opening up specific days to take in donations? There is likely to be pent-up donation demand, I have a year's worth of toddler clothes for example. You could have an open week, get all donations in and shove in the shop without worrying about space, leave for a week, then clean and put out before opening.

I wish I knew how to explain how bad the SARS-CoV-2 survival on surfaces studies have been -- or rather, how unrealistic.

Very high concentrations applied in a perfect medium to sterile very clean surfaces kept in the dark at constant temperatures and high humidity.

Meanwhile, in reality it's an enveloped virus that deactivates fast when exposed to light, when it dries out, if other microbes are around, if temperatures fluctuates, if anything else is on the surface it doesn't like (like salt or detergent residue) (etc). People with active symptoms shouldn't be out smearing their hands to touch lots of things to dump a lot of germs on them. Like someone said -- Tesco sure doesn't quarantine anything they plan to put out.

A lot of the standard precautions we hear about are based on hysteria caution not science specific to SARS-CoV-2.

Noro, sure quarantine to stop that, noro lasts on lots of things for a long time. & maybe more than 3 days. 72 hours wouldn't protect you for sure from noro. But your immune system probably would protect you if you had noro sort of recently & retain immunity anyway.

This is one of the reasons I've put a lot of things on the skip rather than wait to take them to a charity shop. If I knew it was just be a case of dropping stuff off when they reopen I'd have waited but I'm clearing out for a reason and don't want to have to make an appointment to take stuff and hold onto it for longer than necessary.

Is it BHF? That was the only charity shop in my nearby town that had anyone on the door

It's a horrible environmental disaster really. Like pink states, so much has gone into landfill over the last year. Recycling centres have been closed, the countryside round us has been full of dumped items.

When DM died in her care home, we decided to donate all her stuff which the care home cleared. We later found out is was all classed as clinical waste and incinerated. New clothes and shoes she had been given for xmas, burnt. Breaks my heart. Some of the staff took some of her items, with my blessing, and the furniture was kept, but everything else was bagged up. Thing is, if we had brought it home, it would still have been sitting in my garage. Now we are clearing her house - where does it go? No-one wants furniture or clothes, or random items. So, again, I assume we get in a clearance company and they do what with it?

I think the survival depends on the material the virus is on. So paper/card is about 24 hours, cotton is about 24 hours, polyester about 3 days, plastic about 3 days, metal about 4 days except copper which is only 4 hours, and staggeringly glass which is 9 days.

I guess the organisations are trying to protect staff and customers and avoid getting sued because they have a legal obligation to protect employees (as do all employers).

The surface transmission thing is accepted science, which is why we all have to wash our hands regularly.

It's a totally ridiculous rule when you consider everything being touched and turned over by customers on the shop floor. Hopefully it will be scrapped along with many other nonsensical restrictions.

@MRex

I agree with you that it seems unlikely for transmission, but I think the rule will stay in place for months if not all year.

Can you suggest to your manager / head office advertising and opening up specific days to take in donations? There is likely to be pent-up donation demand, I have a year's worth of toddler clothes for example. You could have an open week, get all donations in and shove in the shop without worrying about space, leave for a week, then clean and put out before opening.

That's a great idea. But the manager is furloughed and I'm not sure the rules would allow un-furloughing for a day, then furloughing again. And we did suggest that last time - that volunteers go in and start sorting and clearing out all the old stuff before reopening and we were told no, that it's an insurance issue and definitely not allowed.

All that it means is when stores in Scotland are allowed to reopen on Monday 26th April, in reality we'll need most of that week to get sorted, with a view to reopening on the Friday/Saturday.

It's been such a difficult year for the whole sector. Many of our older volunteers didn't come back after the first lockdown, I'm hoping to see many of them back in May as most will have had 2 doses of the vaccine by then.

I think the survival depends on the material the virus is on. So paper/card is about 24 hours, cotton is about 24 hours, polyester about 3 days, plastic about 3 days, metal about 4 days except copper which is only 4 hours, and staggeringly glass which is 9 days

But just because something can be detected under lab conditions doesn't mean that in real world situations it'd be there in sufficient quantities to actually make anyone ill.

Agree that a lot of it is contradictory - supermarkets and other stores not having to quarantine their deliveries but us having to quarantine donations. We had to shut our changing room to stop people trying things on, but people can take coats/jackets off the rails, try them on and replace and that's fine.

@RaspberryCoulis - I believe they can refurlough if it's for over 3 weeks, so if they organised to do it early that might be feasible and mean they can organise everything that bit earlier.

I suppose it makes no difference if you think the rules are batshit crazy. You still need to follow them to keep others safe

I suppose it makes no difference if you think the rules are batshit crazy. You still need to humour the irrational.

There, fixed it for you.