What to clean, how to clean, UNC professor explains
Rachel Noble is a UNC professor at the Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City. She has a PhD in marine biology and studies how viruses interact with the world.
When the coronavirus outbreak started, she created a simple poster informing people how to disinfect their homes.
"Because when you want to disinfect or clean your house, you don't need a 40-page document," the scientist explained. "You just need a few basic guidance points."
The poster touts three simple agents to to kill the virus. "Those agents are bleach, hydrogen peroxide and isopropyl alcohol at a high enough concentration," Dr. Noble said.
To keep the virus at bay, people should disinfect any surface they touch after coming home from running errands. "So the way I look at the disinfectant," Noble said, "you are strongly, strongly, reducing the amount of virus that could be on that surface."
As the virus outbreak became a reality in March, Noble found common disinfecting information hard for people to find.
"They might have had to go on the CDC website. I went through one day and I counted the number of steps that it took me to get to their disinfecting practices for the home. There were about five or six or seven clicks, so to speak, that we're required to get to that information."
Beyond disinfecting surfaces, Noble also wants people to know they should disinfect their cloth masks as well. "Boiling it and putting it in the laundry are two very effective ways," she said. Laundry should be done on hot.
If boiling the mask, the water should be at least 140 degrees, and let it boil for 8-10 minutes.
Lightweight surgical style masks can not be cleaned. They simply won't hold up. And cloth mask will breakdown over time. Re-using the same mask should only be a short-term solution.
Noble believes this will not only decrease the risk of catching the virus, but by staying healthy, also reduce the strain on the medical community.
"And we know that there's an incredible, not only physical, but also emotional and spiritual toll that is being enacted on our emergency providers and so forth," she said. "And this is really, really important. These are people that do a lot of good things for us, but they're not an infinite resource. Their capacity can only manage for so long."
