The Coronavirus Complications Of An Arizona Cleaning Company

TUCSON, AZ — The coronavirus outbreak emptied schools and offices, changed how people gather indoors and upturned standards for sanitation. It has also made the jobs of David and Trina Petrash, who together run the City Wide of Southern Arizona building management company in Tucson, considerably more complicated.

Gone are the majority of their regular customers, schools and churches, which closed their doors under the state’s stay at home order. In March, the company lost 70 percent of its business in a matter of weeks, David Petrash tells Patch.

Some of those losses have been made up with new customers — David notes that call centers, with their banks of computers and vast phone systems, have “really latched onto” sanitation services as their employees continue to work from offices — but there are times when customers approach City Wide for services that simply don’t exist.

They want the same thing scientists and health officials say won’t exist until an effective vaccine is developed. They want the promise of coronavirus immunity. They’re scared and, David suggests, “It’s easy to blame the person who's doing the sanitizing.”

"The hardest part is when they ask you to guarantee that if you spray tonight their customers will be safe tomorrow,” he adds. “I can't guarantee that. There is no magic bullet.”

All that he can promise is that the contractors he hires will show up in personal protective equipment, commonly known as PPE, and equipped with EPA-approved disinfectant. The company also employs a disinfectant system that sprays electrostatically charged particles that adhere to surfaces.

That’s not the answer customers always want want to hear, Trina says.

"We're trying to be a voice of reason, about what is working, what’s realistic, what's safe,” she says. “You hear people doing some crazy things with bleach; like, just stop!”

Indeed, business owners have at times resorted to cleaning solutions that David describes as “a bit sideways.” He recounts one customer whose employees “fried their computers because they sprayed them with bleach.” Trina recalled one company that “spends a lot of money on nice carpets and furniture, and someone goes spraying bleach on it. Now it's polka-dotted."

Of course, ruined carpets and fried computers aren’t the worst-case scenarios. On Wednesday, the Arizona health department reported 97 new coronavirus deaths — a single-day record — plus 3,257 new cases. And as three teachers in Hayden found out when they each contracted the virus after holding virtual summer school classes in the same classroom, even mask-wearing and social-distancing are no guarantees they won’t be infected.

The result is a new reality for the coronavirus cleaning industry, which has been swarmed with scam artists and questionable claims. Last month, after church officials told attendees at President Donald Trump’s rally that an air-purifying system would ensure “99 percent of COVID is gone,” Arizona’s attorney general issued cease-and-desist letters to both church and system’s Glendale-based manufacturer.

David says he has heard similar claims: One client described a salesperson who promised a $200-per-gallon solution (which was simply a dilution of bleach) could “keep the COVID killed for at least seven days.”

Caught between panicking business owners and confusion over how the virus spreads, the company has been forced into the role of a health educator.

“Someone asked me 'What do you mean you're not protecting us for a week?’” David recounts of a client. “I had to tell them, ‘That's just not how it works.’ It will last until the next person walks out the door and comes in, and if someone with COVID comes in and coughs on it after we leave, it's got COVID germs there again.”

And that’s just what happened to City Wide. David describes it as “probably the most difficult conversation” he’s had with a client since the pandemic began.

“We went in, sprayed, and the next day they called us and said, 'We just had an employee who came in who tested positive, we need you to come back and spray; we don't expect to be charged for anything, and we expect you to be here within the hour.'"

More often, however, David says he’s hearing business owners express worry that the virus’ spread in Arizona will force another shutdown. If that happens, the Petrashes would have to consider bankruptcy for their own company. That could put their futures, as well as those of their seven employees, in jeopardy.

In the meantime, though, the changes in the cleaning and building management industries persist — and they go beyond the uptick in clients asking for sprays of electrostatically charged disinfectant. The changes extend to the way that people relate to their spaces, and who cleans them.

Some customers, suggests Trina, are seeking peace of mind amid the chaos. Just seeing uniformed janitors can make that difference.

“It used to be that people didn't want to see the cleaning people in your office. All you’d know was it smelled good when you showed up for work,” Trina notes.

“Now,” she adds, “people want them to be seen more.”