I hadn't noticed it at the time, but check out this CBC story about reusing facemasks:
Belinda Heyne, professor of chemistry at the University of Calgary, is part of a team who worked to develop a new method that uses a cheap blue dye and light in order to decontaminate medical masks.
"The dye, which is called methylene blue, [is] activated by indoor light. The methylene blue, through its activation, is enabling to take out the energy of the light and giving it to the ambient oxygen that we have around us," Heyne said.
"That's energizing oxygen, and then the oxygen is becoming reactive, and this is what is killing the virus."
You can use light to disinfect things and kill off the virus, you say? Funny, I think I've heard that before...
Oh, right, President Donald J. Trump talked about this stuff and the media (predictably) slammed him for it without any regard for the facts.
After all, some of you reading this will think you know the "fact" that President Donald J. Trump suggested drinking, injecting, or perhaps ingesting bleach. Please, point to where you find that in President Donald J. Trump's full remarks as per below:
So, I’m going to ask Bill a question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing when we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.
This is in response, by the way, to a previous discussion regarding new potential treatments, including off-the-wall ideas in response to a novel coronavirus. Just like with HCQ, the media also likes to pretend that Trump came up with these ideas by himself out of the void and not in reaction to the actual science going on (the French HCQ study was instantly forgotten).
