Sunlight destroys virus quickly, new government tests find, but experts say pandemic could last through summer
Preliminary results from government lab experiments show that the coronavirus does not survive long in high temperatures and high humidity, and is quickly destroyed by sunlight, providing evidence from controlled tests of what scientists believed — but had not yet proved — to be true.
In a statement to Yahoo News, the DHS declined to answer questions about the findings and strongly cautioned against drawing any conclusions based on unpublished data. Simulated sunlight “rapidly killed the virus in aerosols,” the briefing says, while without that treatment, “no significant loss of virus was detected in 60 minutes.”
Droegemeier’s office did not respond to a request for comment on whether it has received the latest results from the DHS. The National Academies also did not respond to a request for comment. The question of the effects of sunlight and heat on the coronavirus has been particularly fraught, because there has been a tendency to misinterpret the relationship between good weather and disease spread. Early on, some politicians tried to encourage people to go outside, including to beaches, arguing that sunlight would kill the virus. The problem, however, is that without widespread immunity, people can still transmit coronavirus to another person, even in warm weather.
“[Ultraviolet] light breaks DNA into fragments. If the virus is floating around in the air and there’s bright sunlight, the UV component in sunlight will break the DNA or the RNA into pieces,” he told Yahoo News.
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