CHINA SPRAYING ENTIRE CITY’S

CHINA SPRAYING ENTIRE CITY’S

China is sending trucks to spray bleach on entire cities as the country struggles to contain the Wuhan coronavirus
The Wuhan coronavirus has sickened more than 28,000 people, and killed at least 565, with almost all of the deaths in China.
Chinese cities have been scrambling to contain the virus, cleaning streets, railway stations, and people with disinfectants, including bleach.

Public health and infection control experts say the cleaning resources would be better spent focusing on wiping down hospitals and markets, since coronaviruses do not live long on hard surfaces.
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Spray trucks, hoses, and bottles filled with household disinfectants like bleach are quickly being dispatched across China, as the country scrambles to control the outbreak of the novel coronavirus known as 2019-nCoV.

The deadly virus, which originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December, has so far sickened more than 28,000 people in 26 countries around the globe, and killed at least 565 people (with just two deaths reported so far outside mainland China.)

CHINA SPRAYING ENTIRE CITY’S

Keeping hospitals and markets clean is a better way to stop the spread of novel viruses
Joe Drake, president and founder of the US-based Decon Seven, said he’s seen such disinfecting sprayer trucks dispatched in cities including Shanghai, Beijing, and Wuhan even before the current coronavirus outbreak.

But health experts say these public displays of germ-busting are probably not doing much to help stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, and that the disinfection should instead target specific spots, like emergency rooms, and communal surfaces in hospitals, where more coronavirus germs are likely to get swapped around.

For that purpose, Drake’s company makes a hydrogen peroxide-based cleanup product that was originally developed to neutralise biological and chemical warfare agents, but is now being sent to at least six different hospitals around China, both inside and outside Hubei province. D7 kills viruses on hard surfaces as well as textiles for up to eight hours, before it degrades into non-potable water, making it far more long-lasting than a bleach and water spray.

“You can foam it, you can mop it, you can put some in a pail and take a rag and wipe surfaces down, or put it in a pump spray bottle, or fog it,” Drake said.

In the US, his products are often used in places like poultry farms, for disinfecting before and after a new group of animals comes in to a barn. But such practices are not so widespread in China, he said.

“I was actually in Wuhan in September, I was in that market,” he said of the spot where scientists suspect the novel virus originally infected a human. “You have live fish, you have dead fish, you have other animals in there … There’s no hygiene standards, they just rinse things down with a garden hose. That doesn’t do anything. You’re just basically creating a bacteria soup.”

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CHINA SPRAYING ENTIRE CITY’S