Masking and isolating are important, but haven’t worked as acceptable long-term solutions. Vaccines are also effective, but producing and disseminating them is slow and inequitable during emerging pandemics. Increasing ventilation, by replacing indoor air with outdoor or filtered air, is another helpful strategy, but often doesn’t provide enough clean air to prevent transmission indoors.

Germicidal ultraviolet technology – or GUV for short – cleans large volumes of air much more quickly than ventilation or filtration, and offers the best available solution to stop widespread transmission from superspreaders. GUV is safe because it uses ultraviolet-C light – or ‘UVC’ – rather than UVA or UVB.

Imagine infectious particles spreading through the air on someone’s exhaled breath, and being zapped by GUV – inactivating the virus before you can inhale it. There are two main types of GUV:

• Higher-wavelength UVC of around 254 nm, which is shone in the upper-portion of a room near the ceiling to avoid potential eye irritation.
• Lower-wavelength UVC of around 222 nm, also known as far-UVC, which is shone downward into occupied areas as it poses no risk to skin or eyes.

To demonstrate and communicate the effectiveness and safety of this technology, Dr. Jacob Bueno de Mesquita and students at Roger Williams University installed far-UVC lights in their classroom and in the campus health center.

They are using spectrometers and film dosimetry on students and healthcare workers to show the magnitude of:

• The risk reduction of airborne viral transmission.
• The remarkable safety profile of the technology under real-world deployment.

Despite a large body of evidence on the effectiveness and safety of GUV, it is poorly adopted as of 2024. According to Bueno de Mesquita, this technology will give us the best chance of quelling COVID-19, seasonal influenza epidemics and new pandemics, while allowing us to continue to congregate as communities. His team aims to address the adoption issue by clearly communicating how airborne pathogens spread and how effectively they can be stopped using GUV.