Recommendation: cover the back of your smartphone in copper tape.
Reasoning: in addition to the reasoning for putting copper on all commonly touched surfaces, your phone is an especially good choice because of the “copper halo effect”, in which copper ions move from copper surfaces to nearby surfaces (like, say, your hands), leaving them much less hospitable to microbes. [Edit: As MalcolmOcean points out, this mechanism for the halo effect isn’t supported by the Wikipedia page below. I made a leap to this explanation without realizing it. That said, I do think that copper (and copper oxides) will get on your hands as a result of this tape, partly because I’ve seen my hands turning a bit blue.]
A downside is that your hands may turn slightly blue. [Also: See the comment below about uncertainty about how much copper you’ll eat as a result of this; tldr: I don’t know but I think it’s probably fine]
[This is a signal boost for Lady Jade Beacham’s response to Connor_Flexman, but the idea was originally introduced to me by James Payor]
Note that this can act as a Faraday cage around your phone and potentially reduce your reception.
With the fullback of my phone covered in copper I got ~0.2 Mbps on 4G. When I removed a 1 in.² on the upper left (where the antenna is on a Google pixel 3) it went up to 13 Mbps.
I assume having everything except for a small square covered is still pretty good, so I’m doing that.
Huh. This is quite important if true. Can anyone with a bit more physics/chemistry knowledge give an estimate for how long this will last on your hands, and how much coverage of your hands you will get? If this is a significant effect, it seems like a pretty useful piece of prep (copper on phones) that I am only just hearing about.
A thing I probably haven’t thought enough about is, “how much this will impact your rate of copper ingestion, and is that very bad?” My guess is that this is less important than the effects on infectious disease; it seems like it would need to increase your copper consumption by 100x in order to produce major negative health effects (https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp132-c2.pdf). I may try to be virtuous and do a fermi on this later but also I’d welcome someone else trying to do it.
Edited to add:
The most obvious effect of having too much copper is gastrointestinal distress. So if you try this and have stomach problems, maybe stop.
A bit more copper might actually be a good idea for people who also take zinc (see the zinc thread elsewhere in this post) as the body needs to keep both of these in some balance.
Dangerous levels of copper seem highly unlikely just from touching but you should probably avoid lining your pots and pans:
The halo effect (section on wikipedia) didn’t seem to me to be about ions… I figured it was just like how if we’re nearby & I’m less likely to get sick, then you’re less likely to get sick, separate from my sickness having any effect on your immunity.
Yeah, you’re right that I imputed a particular mechanism that isn’t supported by the Wikipedia page—thanks for pointing that out. I do still think that the ions-getting-on-things mechanism is part of the story, mostly because the reduction sizes are really large. This could indicate either (a) that most microbes end up on surfaces first via touch surfaces, and spread from there, or (b) that copper ends up on nearby surfaces. Or some of both.
In this particular case, though, I think it’s quite likely (because I’ve seen my hands turn a bit blue) that in fact copper and copper oxides are getting on my hands as a result of the tape.
I would much rather rinse a mobile phone regularly if it is water-proof (an increasing number is!) than use copper tape, although I would not use soap on the screen, to preserve its oleophobic properties; alternatively, if I were in a very susceptible group or if the virus were much more dangerous to me, I would find it more effective to put the phone in a plastic bag and either exchange it often or wash it as often as my own hands.
The thought process here is that copper tape cannot be applied to screens, which can end up very close to faces, but washing with soap is effective.
Recommendation: cover the back of your smartphone in copper tape.
Reasoning: in addition to the reasoning for putting copper on all commonly touched surfaces, your phone is an especially good choice because of the “copper halo effect”, in which copper ions move from copper surfaces to nearby surfaces (like, say, your hands), leaving them much less hospitable to microbes. [Edit: As MalcolmOcean points out, this mechanism for the halo effect isn’t supported by the Wikipedia page below. I made a leap to this explanation without realizing it. That said, I do think that copper (and copper oxides) will get on your hands as a result of this tape, partly because I’ve seen my hands turning a bit blue.]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_copper-alloy_touch_surfaces
A downside is that your hands may turn slightly blue. [Also: See the comment below about uncertainty about how much copper you’ll eat as a result of this; tldr: I don’t know but I think it’s probably fine]
[This is a signal boost for Lady Jade Beacham’s response to Connor_Flexman, but the idea was originally introduced to me by James Payor]
palm rests of laptop are easy too.
Note that this can act as a Faraday cage around your phone and potentially reduce your reception.
With the fullback of my phone covered in copper I got ~0.2 Mbps on 4G. When I removed a 1 in.² on the upper left (where the antenna is on a Google pixel 3) it went up to 13 Mbps.
I assume having everything except for a small square covered is still pretty good, so I’m doing that.
Huh. This is quite important if true. Can anyone with a bit more physics/chemistry knowledge give an estimate for how long this will last on your hands, and how much coverage of your hands you will get? If this is a significant effect, it seems like a pretty useful piece of prep (copper on phones) that I am only just hearing about.
A thing I probably haven’t thought enough about is, “how much this will impact your rate of copper ingestion, and is that very bad?” My guess is that this is less important than the effects on infectious disease; it seems like it would need to increase your copper consumption by 100x in order to produce major negative health effects (https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp132-c2.pdf). I may try to be virtuous and do a fermi on this later but also I’d welcome someone else trying to do it.
Edited to add:
The most obvious effect of having too much copper is gastrointestinal distress. So if you try this and have stomach problems, maybe stop.
A bit more copper might actually be a good idea for people who also take zinc (see the zinc thread elsewhere in this post) as the body needs to keep both of these in some balance.
Dangerous levels of copper seem highly unlikely just from touching but you should probably avoid lining your pots and pans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_toxicity
The halo effect (section on wikipedia) didn’t seem to me to be about ions… I figured it was just like how if we’re nearby & I’m less likely to get sick, then you’re less likely to get sick, separate from my sickness having any effect on your immunity.
Yeah, you’re right that I imputed a particular mechanism that isn’t supported by the Wikipedia page—thanks for pointing that out. I do still think that the ions-getting-on-things mechanism is part of the story, mostly because the reduction sizes are really large. This could indicate either (a) that most microbes end up on surfaces first via touch surfaces, and spread from there, or (b) that copper ends up on nearby surfaces. Or some of both.
In this particular case, though, I think it’s quite likely (because I’ve seen my hands turn a bit blue) that in fact copper and copper oxides are getting on my hands as a result of the tape.
I would much rather rinse a mobile phone regularly if it is water-proof (an increasing number is!) than use copper tape, although I would not use soap on the screen, to preserve its oleophobic properties; alternatively, if I were in a very susceptible group or if the virus were much more dangerous to me, I would find it more effective to put the phone in a plastic bag and either exchange it often or wash it as often as my own hands.
The thought process here is that copper tape cannot be applied to screens, which can end up very close to faces, but washing with soap is effective.
It is possible to both rinse your phone and put copper tape on it.
Another cost is that my hands smell like copper now.
Maybe we should put copper on our hand sanitizer bottles. But does it take effect quickly enough to matter here?