Safer ways to receive and open your GFH order

At GFH, we are taking great care in ensuring that your order is sent quickly and safely. In the face of the COVID-19 outbreak, we wanted to try and provide you with some guidance on how you make sure that you enjoy your purchase by giving some tools that can help minimize your risk. One thing that’s important to remember is that these are ‘safer’ ways to limit transmission. Nothing is 100% effective but we would like to give you some information and suggestions based on the latest study and information from reliable sources. 

Yes, the coronavirus can be detected on some surfaces, but its levels drop off quickly and its viability also drops off over time. For example, on cardboard, no viable coronavirus was measured after 24 hours. On plastics, however, some amount of viable virus was detected up to 72 hours after application. 

To more fully protect yourself, given that many hands might touch your package during transportation and delivery, you can consider taking the following steps:

The shipment

• First things first, wash your hands after you touch the package/box and do not touch your face/mouth/eyes/nose until you do.
• Consider opening/removing your order outside your house or apartment and immediately recycling the box (then wash your hands)
• Try placing the package inside your door or outside and leaving it overnight (then wash your hands) and opening it the next day
• If you’re still concerned that there might be a virus on the package, you could wipe down the exterior (especially plastic parts) with a disinfectant.
• Wash your hands (again)

The items you ordered inside the box 

• For items that have a factory seal on them such as plastic packaging, you could:
• Open the box outside, wash your hands/use disinfectant, and remove the product(s) (but keep the box in the rare case that the product is defective and you need to return it) 
• For loose items/items without a factory seal
• Consider leaving them by your door/out of the way overnight
• If safe & effective, use disinfectant or wash the item
• Then wash your hands (again)!

For more information, please see these articles:

Washington Post: Opinion | Don’t panic about shopping, getting delivery or accepting packages

New England Journal of Medicine: Aerosol and Surface Stability of SARS-CoV-2 as Compared with SARS-CoV-1

CDC: COVID-19: Resources for Households

Please note, all of the information listed here are suggestions that are accurate at the time of publication of this post and of the posts referenced in this article. This information is subject to change as research continues and time passes and we will do our best to update our post as things develop.