Yes. According to the CDC and confirmed by the World Health Organization, US Department of Homeland Security, and The National Institute of Health and documented in the New England Journal of Medicine, any infected employee can cough or exhale and release droplets of infected fluid on surfaces, which can live and infect others for 3 days or longer. “A person can become infected by touching a surface where these droplets land before touching their eyes, mouth, or nose.”

Clinical evidence shows that high-touch surfaces play a significant role in pathogen transmission. Dr. Charles Gerba of the University of Arizona, generally regarded as the nation’s leading expert on Environmental Biology, demonstrated how quickly germs travel through an office environment when just one person comes to work sick. In his 2012 study, a single infected person using a shared keyboard spread the infection to over 50% of keyboards in an 80-person department within 4 hours.

To address this issue, most companies today manually disinfect all common areas and shared work environments daily. However, an Ohio State University research study demonstrated that cleaning crews can miss up to 50% of the surface area.

Many companies will place disinfecting wipes on the desks for the employees to wipe down prior to starting their day, though this is also unreliable. First, employees may simply forget as the muscle memory of sitting down with a cup of coffee and getting right to work returns. They also often neglect to disinfect the monitor, which is touched when adjusted. Additionally, the keyboard is difficult to properly sanitize with wipes or a cloth.

But the biggest problem with wipes is that it is easy to just spread the germs across the desk if not done correctly. Disinfection, as detailed on the instruction labels, calls for applying the disinfectant and leaving it wet and untouched for anywhere from 4 to 10-minutes, depending on the brand. This is very rarely done. The typical 15-second swish could actually do more harm than good.

Clearly, a virus mitigation strategy that relies solely on manual cleaning or employees wiping down the desk themselves is likely ineffective.

UV or ultraviolet light is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which includes radio waves at one end and gamma rays at the other.

The energy produced by the sun is electromagnetic radiation with many different wavelengths. Only a small portion of these wavelengths are visible to the human eye. These visible wavelengths are seen as colors of the rainbow depending on the wavelength. Red has the longest visible wavelength and violet has the shortest visible wavelength. Waves longer than those seen as red, are called infrared.  Waves shorter than violet are called ultraviolet, as in “beyond violet”.  Ultraviolet light comes in different lengths too.

The wavelength of light is defined as the distance between two identical point of the light wave, for example, one crest to the next. They are measured in nanometers, which is one billionth of a meter.

The wavelength of UV light ranges from 10nm to 400nm and is classified into 3 sub-bands: UV-A (315-400 nm), which are blacklights, UV-B (280 – 315nm), which is the light that tans the human skin and, if overexposed, causes sunburn, and UV-C (100-280nm), which is a known virus killer.