Sunshine and COVID-19

Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2020 22:20:09 -0400
From: “John Dykers M.D.”
Subject: Sunshine and COVID19 -RickJoy’s post

Thank you for your link; I checked it. The weatherman explained about  the atmosphere filtering out 95% of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. If  it did not, we would all be toast!

Rick is certainly correct that lying out in the sun, taking a sunbath,  will not kill corona virus inside our body. But the same ultraviolet  light that gives you a sunburn, if you sunbathe too long, will kill most  bacteria and viruses, even the tough tuberculosis germ.

UV rays have been used to sterilize delicate medical devices (that could  not withstand an autoclave) for decades. I checked with Siri and her  first link was to a UV device maker, Dan Arnold, works for UV Light  Technology, who was denigrating the ultra violet radiation from the sun  as not being of a wavelength to kill a virus so he used his machine to  make a “stronger” UV 2 or 3 that would sterilize instruments and was too  strong for human skin. How long in how strong a sun is certainly  important as the detail in the BBC  link explains. So Rick is correct  about another important point; be careful of your sources and your  interpretation of what you find. The devil is in the details, and again  Rick is correct that we don’t rely on sunshine to keep us safe from  COVID19 but it helps.

Avoiding the machine’s UV wavelength would certainly be true for not  using such in tanning booths -they are not a good idea anyway because of  the risk of DNA cell damage that causes melanoma and squamous cell and basal cell skin cancers, just as sunburn damage does. This same sunshine  will damage a corona virus exposed to it and render it incapable of  entering our human body, but unknown how long and how much. Still wash your hands. Viruses are complex conglomerations of DNA, and if that DNA  enters a cell, even the cells of the  bat this COVID19 seems to have  used to pass into the human population originally, it may raise havoc. COVID19 won’t survive long on cardboard anyway, so we don’t get sick  from the mail; not more than 2-3 days on a steel or copper surface;  longest on plastic, maybe 3-4 days, and this is expressed in a range because the studies show a dramatic fall off in numbers of spots that  still had findable virus until the number becomes so small as to be  insignificant mathematically. The Rous Sarcoma in chickens is caused by  a papilloma virus. Cervical and throat cancers in humans are caused by  the human papilloma virus (HPV) we now have a vaccine to prevent. I hope  we will have an effective vaccine for COVID19 soon.

I apologize for not giving you a “Link”; I read about this sort of thing so much I don’t keep references unless I am writing a journal paper. see dykers.com


John Dykers