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Glass counters: a return bound to happen to guarantee social distancing

Since the start of the crisis, sales of glass counters have skyrocketed!

The worldwide Covid-19 sanitary crisis that we are currently experiencing has changed our way of life completely. Our old familiar forms of social contact have now become risk factors. As a consequence businesses, stores and restaurants find themselves forced to adapt as best they might so as to be able to continue to serve their customers whilst limiting the risks to the minimum.

Although it is still hard to tell how much longer this crisis might drag on and whether its impact on social contacts will be really long-lasting, we witness an increase in demand for our glass counters and our protective glass panes.

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Glass counters, always popular

The current Covid-19 pandemic may give the impression that glass counters have been given a new role: preventing contamination via a spray of saliva micro-droplets and transmission via aerosol particles in certain enterprises and businesses. However, this has been their intended use since as far back as 1946, when a stubborn flu epidemic set out from China and hit us with full force, first picking off the people behind the counter.

Bulletproof reception desk and electronic intercom system

Half-hearted popularity

This popular system was then further upgraded in order to resist intrusion and gunshot. However, as the years went by and, in the absence of any great epidemic, it gradually fell into disuse, apart from in certain more security-aware enterprises such as banks. A glass screen between a staff member and a client somehow gave the impression that staff members were huddled away in their defensive trenches and that they were not listening.

A big comeback in all sectors

The complexity of the current situation forces us to fall back on such solutions whilst also updating them in the light of modern sensibilities in order to better cater to the needs of modern societies. Although physical counters may be rather less numerous than they were back in the 1960s due to the proliferation of on-line systems for instance, other enterprises such as convenience stores or restaurants are now obliged to adopt these solutions quickly if they seriously hope to protect their staff and customers to the best of their abilities.

Glazed counter with intercom and wooden tablet cover

Metal Quartz: glass counters for more hygiene and safety

Our main advantage is being able to offer adaptable modular elements suitable for use in a wide variety of applications and meeting the particular needs of all types of enterprises and businesses. Thanks to our extremely slim profiles we limit, as far as possible, the presence of the counter that gets between the public side and the protected one. In doing so the relation gets precedence over protection. In fact, we want to see a distancing that is more physical than social.

Our counters dovetail in with the sanitary needs of enterprises and businesses in the front line of the current pandemic. These barrier counters provide physical protection against the airborne transmission of micro-organisms.

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There are two types of contamination:

transmission by air/aerosol (inhalation of droplet nuclei or micro-droplets in suspension in the air that can be carried over distance from the originally infected person and suspended in the air);
transmission by droplets (direct contact with saliva droplets from the originally infected person and his/her mucosa or by indirect contact with contaminated surfaces and then by touching your face with your hands (nose, mouth or eyes).

At Metal Quartz we also offer solutions up to the most stringent safety standards. And that is precisely why, for years now, we have been constructing protective counters that are safe against intrusion, armed attack or burglary.