An important update for me was that the halflife on copper is ~3.5 hours, which means that it’s actually quite awhile before copper will kill coronavirus thoroughly enough to be “safe”. I think it’s more useful as something that “becomes clean overnight” than something like “you can reliably use a copper thing without having to clean it.”
This was the clear winner of JPA Olympics– it’s cheap, effective, and very few people had heard of it before. In fact we were hoping for a highly polished, intensely researched post on just this; unfortunately no one has the time right now.
In its place, please enjoy these links:
This pre-print showed that this coronavirus in particular had a half life of 2.4-5.11 hours on copper, in contrast to 10.5-16.1 on steel or 13-19.2 on plastic
This review showed H1N1 decreased by 4 logs (a factor of 10^4) in 6 hours;
This study showed vaccinia and monkeypox viruses reduced by 6 logs (a factor of 10^6) in 3 minutes
This study showed murine norovirus was destroyed in 30 minutes, though it doesn’t work very well at 4C;
This review says that copper oxide filters neutralize all of “bacteriophages [58-62], Infectious Bronchitis Virus [63], Poliovirus [61,64], Junin Virus [59], Herpes Simplex Virus [58,59], Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV-1) [11,65-67], West Nile Virus [11], Coxsackie Virus Types B2 & B4, Echovirus 4 and Simian Rotavirus SA11 [68]. More recently, the inactivation of Influenza A [55,65], Rhinovirus 2, Yellow Fever, Measles, Respiratory Syncytial Virus, Parainfluenza 3, Punta Toro, Pichinde, Adenovirus Type 1, Cytomegalovirus, and Vaccinia [65]”.
From the Justified Advice Thread Summary
An important update for me was that the halflife on copper is ~3.5 hours, which means that it’s actually quite awhile before copper will kill coronavirus thoroughly enough to be “safe”. I think it’s more useful as something that “becomes clean overnight” than something like “you can reliably use a copper thing without having to clean it.”