In Times of Coronavirus, we are more than ever aware of the need to be pure and immaculate. Never has cleanliness been closer to godliness. We look for the most effective cleaning products for our homes. We now spend more time deciding which soap, sanitizer, or cleaning fluid to purchase than on which shade of lipstick to buy. ‘Clean’, ‘disinfected’, and ‘sanitized’ have become synonyms for ‘beautiful’.
Fortunately for all of us, the road to cleanliness is fairly straightforward and mostly involves various daily encounters with soap and water. All of us have learned how to wash our hands like a cardiothoracic surgeon about to embark on a high-risk heart transplant. Even if we did not shower once or twice a day before confinement, we certainly do now. Our washing machines are so overworked that they have threatened to go on strike.
As for our homes, we mercilessly bombard doorknobs and counter surfaces with Lysol, Mr. Clean, and Ajax. We mop our floors with bleach solutions because Covid-19, though resistant to any pharmaceutical drug, is a 92-pound weakling when it comes to soap and water. In Times of Coronavirus, we constantly look for new and better ways to clean and disinfect both our homes and ourselves.
However, this quest for cleanliness has led to a few glitches. One of the most recent is the Ozone Paradox. Is ozone a cleaning agent or a pollutant? We cannot figure out whether this molecule is a hero or a villain.
For those of us who are not chemists, environmental scientists, or similar, ozone is a confusing entity. It is like oxygen (O2) but not really. Its chemical formula (O3) looks like it was on the oxygen train, but traveled one stop too far.
We know that it is a gas, but we are unsure whether it is beneficial or harmful. We agonize over holes in the ozone layer way up in the stratosphere, but down in the troposphere, ozone emissions are on the list of pollution agents, and certainly not anything that we wish to inhale. To make things more confusing, a branch of alternative medicine (unapproved by the FDA) uses ozone gas to fight diseases, such as arthritis, heart disease, and even cancer.
Given its split personality, ozone is like a molecular Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We need it at one atmospheric level, but flee from it at another. Although stratospheric ozone is good because it protects living things from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, ground-level ozone seems to be bad because it can trigger a variety of respiratory problems.
Now, in Times of Coronavirus, ozone has a new role. It has come into the spotlight as a powerful disinfectant for both water and air. Given the current focus on cleanliness, there is now an aggressive marketing campaign that foments the purchase of ozone disinfection machines for businesses and homes.
The advertising hype usually includes phrases such as, “300 times more powerful than bleach”, or “the disinfectant most recommended by the WHO” (which happens to be untrue). For a modest investment of 100-1000 euros, one can purchase a device that is supposedly able to disinfect a large area of one’s house simply at the press of a button. It is a feat of magic that even David Copperfield would envy. The problem is that when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
Although ozone is a powerful disinfectant, no study has as yet shown that ozone disinfection also eliminates the coronavirus. It is currently being tested in Germany and the Netherlands, but so far, there have been no conclusive results. So, it may or may not work against Covid-19. We simply don’t know. However, there is a long list of products that have been found to be effective.
Why not use one of them instead of a substance that has not as yet been successfully tested?
The answer to this question lies in an inherent characteristic of human nature: laziness. Cleaning something with bleach takes a great deal of effort. It is also extremely unpleasant because of the fumes that cause one’s head to spin. Bleach, however, has been proven to strike fear in the heart of the coronavirus.
In Spain, instead of Clorox, we have Lejía El Conejo [Rabbit Bleach]. This cleaning product comes in a large yellow bottle with a blue label showing a white rabbit. The connection between rabbits and bleach is one of the great mysteries of Spanish advertising.
The bleach rabbit is simply a rabbit, and does not facilitate cleaning in the same way as those selfless forest creatures, enslaved by Snow White to clean the dwarfs’ house. For this reason, we are obliged to seek high-tech machinery to make our life easier.
However, ozone magic comes at a price. In the normal order of things, when ozone disinfection is professionally carried out in clinical settings, this process takes place in unoccupied spaces, and the work is done by a team wearing protection equipment.
This is understandable because the ozone level required for disinfection is toxic. Inhaling even fairly low amounts of ozone can result in coughing, congestion, shortness of breath, and chest pain even in otherwise healthy people. People with already existing respiratory ailments may find that their conditions worsen while inhaling ozone.
So, if I wished to buy an ozone disinfection machine for my apartment, common sense (the most uncommon of all senses) would tell me that it would not be very effective. I could probably use the device to freshen up the air a bit since this can be achieved with a relatively low ozone level.
However, I would need a more toxic level for disinfection. (The FDA states that in order for ozone to be effective as a germicide, it must be present in a concentration far greater than that which can be safely inhaled.)
Furthermore, even if I called in a specialized team to ozonize my apartment (and temporarily moved across the hall to live with the Neanderthals), this still might not be a good solution because no one knows if the coronavirus is afraid of ozone.
This morning I went to see Mrs. Neanderthal for the first time since the pandemic began. Now that we are in Phase 1, such visits are finally permitted. She told me that she was thinking about buying an ozone disinfection machine, and asked me what I thought. I told her that unless she wanted to permanently do away with Mr. Neanderthal (who happens to have a heart condition), she should stick with Lejía El Conejo.
