Bureau Veritas Advised By Cleveland Clinic Announces The First Global Hygiene Standards To Reboot The World’s Economy
“For the economy to fully recover, people will have to be fully confident.” — U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell
There’s a standard for everything these days. Worker safety. Food service. Seatbelts. Lawn mower emissions. Cultivating cannabis. Even how to give a massage or cut hair.
So with so much riding on the world economy re-opening while avoiding a second coronavirus infection surge, many businesses and policymakers are baffled by the lack of a uniform hygiene and health safety standard to lean on across hotels, restaurants, retail stores, bars, office spaces, factories, and schools that leverages our accumulated knowledge of virology, testing, and sanitization to help rebuild consumer confidence in the “new” normal.
Bureau Veritas, the world’s oldest testing and certification company founded in 1828, in conjunction with Cleveland Clinic, is finally answering that call, consolidating the currently fragmented global (and American) approach to re-opening—and, more importantly, the lack of specific protocols and guidelines underpinning it—into a single uniform set of standards across businesses for hygiene control and health safety as companies slow walk back into business.
The new program announced today, “Restart Your Business With BV”, leverages the company’s global expertise in testing, inspection, and certification with Cleveland Clinic’s world-renowned medical knowledge and toxicology experience to help businesses restart safely while adhering to benchmark health, safety, cleaning, and hygiene guidelines that can be applied across industries.
Cleveland Clinic will serve as the program’s Chief Medical Director, while Bureau Veritas will oversee implementation, education, and compliance on the ground, including the creation of detailed Health Safety and Hygiene Guides, employee training, surface testing, product criteria, ongoing audits and monitoring, and the creation of a uniform certification program called the Safe Guard Hygiene Excellence Label.
For most of us who just want to get back to normal—or as close to it as possible at this point—the intellectual canyon between Ph.D virology (we’ve all seen enough of Drs. Fauci and Birx on television) and basic consumer confidence is vast. Phrases like “certification protocols”, “compliance mechanisms”, and “operational audits” don’t really resonate with people who just want to go to the movies, grab a beer, or take their family to Disneyland again.
So transparency, traceability, and simple validation principles are where Bureau Veritas’ “Restart Your Business with BV” program begins, especially in the travel and hospitality sectors where what’s going on behind the curtain to keep guests safe in the stealthy, undetected realms where pathogens ultimately spread is what consumers are concerned about most.
Unlike manufacturing and assembly line production, or commercial businesses like law or architectural firms—where work stations can be respaced 6’ apart and most people go home at night so extra deep cleans can be implemented—eating out, staying at a hotel, getting on an airplane, or grabbing a drink with friends is what “normalcy” looks like for most of the world. It’s also the most publicly visible and challenging part of the human economy to make normal again since nothing’s predictable, and every interaction and transaction is historically predicated on dense interpersonal contact.
So far, guidance for businesses like restaurant operators, bars, and hotels from the Centers For Disease Control (CDC) has favored broad principles over specific requirements and protocols, such as “Intensify cleaning, sanitization, disinfection, and ventilation”. The problem with this approach is that it leaves a lot up to interpretation. Does “intense cleaning” mean scrub harder and double the bleach? To beef up “ventilation” if I own a pizza joint do I just open the windows? How sanitized is “sanitized”?
Bureau Veritas’ calculus with its new partnership with Cleveland Clinic is that if you can establish actual hygiene and health safety protocols with clear, measurable, and enforceable standards—and as a result restore broad-based consumer confidence in hospitality—you can do it anywhere, like schools and universities.
So what can consumers expect to see from Bureau Veritas new COVID-19 standards program as it begins to roll out this week?
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