2 Orange County Walmart Supercenters Close For COVID Sanitization

ANAHEIM, CA —Both Anaheim and San Clemente's Walmart Supercenters are temporarily closed while the stores undergo a detailed cleaning, the megachain announced Monday.

Both stores, each approximately 180,000 square feet in size, will be closed for a detailed "cleaning and building sanitization," according to the corporate affairs team, part of a "company-initiated program." An outside company will perform the cleaning, they say.

The Anaheim Supercenter location at 440 N Euclid Street was closed Sunday and Monday, thoroughly sanitized, and remained shuttered to allow associates time to restock shelves and prep the store to reopen Tuesday morning.

The San Clemente Supercenter at 951 Avenida Pico closed Monday at 2 p.m. The San Clemente store followed the same protocol of cleaning and restocking and remains closed through Wednesday morning at 7 a.m.

While the reason for the closures was not immediately made clear—if employees of those stores were found sickened due to coronavirus or if coronavirus infected shoppers were found to have visited those locations—these closures have a massive impact.

Approximately 10,000 cars visit a Walmart Supercenter a day, according to the Institute of Transportation Engineers. Walmart owns 144 Supercenters in California, according to its corporate website.

Though Walmart Supercenter announced their closure over social media, comments for those posts, such as this one from San Clemente, were not engaged.

How do you know if you've been around someone infected by coronavirus?

Contact tracing has continued to evolve since the beginning of the pandemic in March. Though the Orange County Health Care Agency is ultimately the first line of defense in contact tracing, with so many people exposed to the disease, more are turning toward online applications.

The latest evolution of this is through the California Notify app. According to the app's information page, downloaded and activated by over 4 million users in early December, this app serves as an exposure alert tool and works via Bluetooth. Purely voluntary in nature, the CA Notify app an "honor-based" notification system. Once you activate the app, if you test positive for coronavirus, the GPS proximity alert would then notify people around you with the app that they should be tested.

Each Walmart store has provided clear-plastic sneeze guards at registers, social distancing signs, and directional traffic indicators within the stores. In advance of the holiday season, few shoppers adhered to those markers as they gathered their goods for at-home holiday celebrations.

In a statement provided, the store's closure is for the "well-being of our associates and customers, and in consideration of guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and health experts."

Though the company did not admit that an employee member or staff member tested positive for coronavirus, citing privacy protections when asked, they did say at the reopening the stores will "continue conducting associate health screens and temperature checks," the statement reads. "All associates will be provided with facemasks and gloves."

Patch has reached out to Walmart's corporate headquarters for more information and will update this post when that is received.