How to Disinfect Everything: Coronavirus Home Cleaning Tips

Below, we get into the weeds of how long the virus might last on surfaces, which disinfectants may kill it, and the steps you should take to keep clean.You’ve heard it a million times by now, and you’ll hear it a million more, but the best way to lower your risk of contracting Covid-19 (or pass it on to someone else) is to wash your hands after you cough, sneeze, touch your face, use the restroom, or are about to leave one place for another. The CDC recommends we all do a bit of both, even if nobody in your home is sick.Cleaning is about removing contaminants from a surface.Disinfecting is about killing pathogens.Do both daily if anything or anyone has entered or exited your home.Transmission from person-to-person is a much greater risk than transmission via surfaces, but the CDC recommends we clean and disinfect high-touch surfaces in our homes at least once daily just to be safe, assuming we have had contact with the outside world in some way, either a person leaving and returning, or goods coming in.Researchers have found that the novel coronavirus is capable of living on surfaces such as cardboard, plastic, and stainless steel for two to three days. So disinfecting high-touch surfaces is a step we should all take.High-Touch Surfaces to Clean and Disinfect Daily:Everyone’s home is a little different, so just think about the surfaces you interact with most. Just adding these to your daily routine can help lower the risk of infection for you and anyone else in your household.The EPA has a full list of disinfectants that will kill the novel coronavirus, but here are a few essentials to keep an eye out for. Just washing your clothes with regular laundry soap and drying them at slightly higher temperature than you might have otherwise is all you have to do to disinfect your clothes.Be sure to disinfect surfaces the dirty laundry comes in contact with, including the hamper and your hands—especially if you have a sick person in the house.Clean and disinfect the hamper like you would any other surface, and wash your hands thoroughly after handling dirty laundry from someone who is ill. Following the CDC recommendations for other high-touch surfaces in the home, a once-daily disinfecting isn’t going to hurt your devices.(Read our full guide to disinfecting your phone.)Laptop displays aren’t always made of glass (matte displays are plastic) so avoid using a disinfecting wipe on the screen, just in case. But otherwise, just make sure you wipe down the mouse (top, sides, and bottom), the keys on your keyboard, the exterior of the keyboard, and any mousepad you might have.For any other electronic device, if the exterior is largely plastic (gaming mice, gamepads, TV remotes) it’s safe to give ‘em a once over with a disinfecting wipe or isopropyl alcohol solution.There's a lot going on right now.