We all want the coronavirus to go away and for COVID-19, social distancing and everything that goes with it to be remembered as a horrible part of a weird year.

There are some encouraging signs, with Pfizer announcing promising news about a vaccine candidate and other medical companies making progress. But what if the vaccine isn’t effective, the virus mutates or it returns in different forms, like the flu?

Those possibilities are why everyone, but especially building managers, must ask the question of what we do if COVID doesn’t go away, said John Shanahan, President of Ionogen.

“Maybe it’s a mutation or maybe the flu gets smarter. We have to have more long-term strategies for getting people back into business,” Shanahan said.

Shanahan has found his company’s hypochlorous solutions highly effective in Ionogen’s own office, with none of his team of 50 testing positive for COVID during the pandemic.

“In February, when this really started to ramp up, we deployed all the humidification devices in our building. Because we made surface sanitizers and disinfectants and they were still trying to figure out what COVID was, we put the air sanitizers up as a preventative measure,” he said. “We were so busy February, March, April and May that there was no stopping. But because we have both the physical staff in our manufacturing division and we needed to be able to collaborate, we just added more units into our space.”

Now, they’re looking into the positive results of hypochlorous actually getting into the upper respiratory areas and potentially killing the virus.

“We’re very excited about the future of where this is going to take us. We will continue, as always, to do more testing and trials and the continued research on this,” Shanahan said. “We’re committed to science, and we like proof. Anecdotes are great, and we’ve got a lot of anecdotes about how this has worked up until now. Now, we’ll continue to dig down into the science. Hypochlorous could very well be the antidote without having to take the immunization.”