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At a recent White House briefing, the President brought out one of the acting deputy secretaries at the Department of Homeland Security to discuss tests they carried out showing that ultraviolet light can kill the virus. Is this something that could be employed to disinfect people? Tacoma MD Dr. Gordon Cohen joined Seattle’s Morning News to discuss.

“Well, first of all, that’s not new information,” Cohen said. “Ultraviolet light kills things, it kills bacteria, it kills viruses. It’s used in hospital settings to sterilize things. There are devices that you can buy for your your iPhone now where you can put your iPhone into a case that has ultraviolet light and it kills viruses and bacteria, so ultraviolet light is a well-known disinfectant.”

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That said, it doesn’t mean we should be jumping into tanning beds or heading to the beach thinking it’s going to help fight off coronavirus.

“The notion that a human being could just lay down in a tanning bed or go out in the sun and that that ultraviolet light exposure is going to kill viruses inside your body, that’s never been demonstrated to be the case and it’s not going to be the case here either.”

Reopening too soon?

A few places across the country, including Georgia and South Carolina, are considering reopening, but according to Dr. Cohen, we haven’t properly established enough science-based reopening protocols and may be endangering lives.

“I understand the enthusiasm to get the economy reopen because it’s a huge burden on everybody,” he said. “Everybody’s feeling it, everybody’s struggling financially. In one way or another, people are having cabin fever. There’s a lot of reasons why it needs to happen.”

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“However, why did we start doing this in the first place? We started to do it in the first place to save lives, and we just don’t know enough about this. The White House did create three stages of guidelines about how to go about reopening, but … I think there’s so little science here other than the science we know of the risk of infection. And what I find incredibly concerning is that we’re going to reopen the economy without any sort of regulations to prevent further infections.”

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