3 Ways Scientists Think We Could De-Germ a Covid-19 World

With Covid-19 restrictions easing and people returning to restaurants, bars, and shopping malls, a new strategy is emerging to protect us: creating an antiviral infrastructure. Scientists still don’t fully understand Covid-19’s transmission—how much risk there is in touching surfaces and then one’s face, or how long the virus persists in aerosols. To show how easily microbes can spread in a workplace, environmental microbiologist Charles Gerba and his University of Arizona colleagues put Glo Germ, a fluorescent resin visible only under black light, on doorknobs, a water fountain handle, and other commonly touched surfaces in three offices. In a 2019 study, Gerba and his colleagues seeded doorknobs with a tracer phage—a virus that attacks bacteria but doesn’t affect humans—and similarly found rapid spread. “What we’re doing really is reducing their survival time, and that reduces the probability that they’re going to be transmitted from one person to the next.” In a 2019 study, he found the temporary coating reduced hospital-acquired infections by 36 percent, and in a preprint study Gerba and lead author Luisa Ikner, a University of Arizona microbiologist, found it reduced the surface concentration of a common cold coronavirus by 90 percent within 10 minutes and 99.9 percent within two hours.