Fight the Virus with Sunshine

Though I have never been one that is big on taking vitamin and mineral supplements, right now in these current conditions I am taking supplements of Zinc and vitamins C,D,E.

As many of you know I am an on-call truck driver. A troubleshooter that gets paid a salary to cover runs on short notice. During these unusual times I am still on-call but I am being required to take regular scheduled runs to justify my salary. I was scheduled to take a Nestles load to Robesonia, PA on Monday. The load departure was pushed back 24 hours then after that delayed until the 7th.

The only other loads they had that were not subject to cancelation were to South Eastern NY and this 64 year old man has no intention of going there right now. My wife’s state of health is not good and I’m not taking any chances of brining something back to her. If their backs get up against the wall and they really need me they know they can call and I’ll come running.

So I took the rest of the week as unpaid vacation That leaves the runs I would have done this week for regular drivers that get paid by the mile and should help with driver retention.

Jim,

Last week I had noticed a local sign on a playground, one of the few playgrounds which couldn’t be locked, and upon reading it learned that our local people are disinfecting playgrounds. I thought this a waste of resources. When I returned home with my kids, I began to look on the internet for sunshine and COVID19. People are bound to be afterward affected with the idea that the world is contaminated. I found a stunning amount of careless thinking. A typical Q/A on a fact checking site, or media site looked like….

Q: Does UV light kill the Corona virus?
A: No. The CDC says that using UV light to disinfect surfaces can be irritating to skin.

Readers of WUWT may notice that these geniuses have failed to answer their own question. The correct response would have been. “Yes, the corona virus can be killed by UV, but a person should not use a UV lamp to disinfect skin as this may cause skin damage.”

So I began to research for what is known about how long the COVID19 virus can survive in sunlight. I was surprised to learn that this is not front and center in this time of panic — it would be good to know how long it takes sunshine in any given place to disinfect a surface.

There is a paper from 2005 in the Journal of Virology which investigated a couple of dozen virus families, and which had a nice table of how long it took UV at 254nm wavelength to reduce the active population to 1/e (37%) of its initial value, and then a translation to sunlight equivalent as sunlight does not have much 254nm wavelength. The range of values is a few minutes to a bit over an hour. Unfortunately corona viruses were not among the list, but this gives one a start about the needed dosage of sunlight.

Something a bit more specific is in the article, Miriam E.R. Darnell, et al, Inactivation of the coronavirus that induces severe acute respiratory syndrome, SARS-CoV, Journal of Virological Methods 121(1):85-91, September 2004.

Here is the flux from their lamp….

The UV light source (Spectronics Corporation, Westbury, NY) was placed above the plate, at a distance of 3 cm from the bottom of the wells containing the virus samples. At 3 cm our UVC light source (254 nm) emitted 4016 μW/cm2 (where μW = 10−6 J/s) and the UVA light source (365 nm) emitted 2133 μW/cm2, as measured by radiometric analysis (Spectronics Corporation).

With this flux the COV-1 virus was attenuated to complete inactivity in about 6 minutes, suggesting a D37 of a couple of minutes. Now, they also noticed very little deactivation using UVA over 15 minutes, and the reason is likely that DNA/RNA only weakly absorb UVA. However, sunlight contains UVA and UVB. From the paper…

UVB can cause the induction of pyrimidine dimers, but 20–100-fold less efficiently than UVC (Perdiz et al., 2000). UVA is weakly absorbed by DNA and RNA, and is much less effective than UVC and UVB in inducing pyrimidine dimers, but may cause additional genetic damage through the production of reactive oxygen species, which cause oxidization of bases and strand breaks (Tyrrell et al., 2001).

There we go. One would think at this point in time one would have far better guidance on this subject than we have. Yet, a 15 minute dosage of UVA is very unlikely to do much to most of the viruses in citation #1, above.

However, in response to Willis’ article yesterday, I wrote about the immuno-compromised person in my wife’s family. The medical advice they were given regarding sunlight was that some hours in sunlight would be sufficient to sterilize surface which could not be sterilized otherwise. BTW, the above article also indicates sterilization in solutions of pH12, which is not at all like the narrow pH range of “Andromeda Strain” fame, or at temperatures above 65C.

Ozone at about .02ppm is safe for continuous exposure. This concentration would knock off over 90% of airborne virus particles, meaning vastly lower initial dose. Mortality is linked to the initial viral load. As a bonus, ozone would kill viruses in the lungs, slowing the progression. This would allow the body to produce antibodies before the virus takes hold of the lungs. People with co-morbidities are vulnerable to something like a flu – the last straw. Thousands die each year from the seasonal flu. Shutting down the entire world economy and taking away freedoms is suspect.

Ozone is typically produced by corona discharge!