President Donald Trump, who speculated last year that sunlight might neutralize the coronavirus, has been vindicated as a recent study claims UV rays might actually kill the virus eight times fast than previously believed.
UC Santa Barbara released its findings of a multi-university study this past week which took an in-depth look at the role sunshine plays in neutralizing active viral particles.
“In a letter in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, a team of researchers from UC Santa Barbara, Oregon State University, University of Manchester and ETH Zurich examines another of SARS-CoV-2’s well known characteristics — its vulnerability to sunlight. Their conclusion? It might take more than UV-B rays to explain sunlight inactivation of SARS-CoV-2,” the university noted.
When blasting the virus in synthetic saliva with UVB light in a lab setting, researchers set out to test a theory that, if predictions were accurate, might have seen “sunlight inactivation of SARS-CoV-2” occur with prolonged exposure to ultraviolet rays.
“The theory predicts that inactivation should happen an order of magnitude slower,” said UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering professor Paolo Luzzatto-Fegiz said.
The joint university study noted something peculiar: “In the experiments, viruses in simulated saliva and exposed to UV-B lamps were inactivated more than eight times faster than would have been predicted by the theory.”
The school added, “[cultured samples] in a complete growth medium before exposure to UV-B were inactivated more than three times faster than expected,” but the study concluded more research was needed.
