Summary

The stealth and speed at which COVID-19 spread to become a global pandemic underscores the significance of the threat. General isolation techniques and hygenic best practices have been well proven in the past, but the fact that it's now showing up on remote islands in the Pacific suggest even best efforts are not sufficient in a globally connected economy to fully contain a disease of this nature.

Four key factors are noted to make a difference given the known conditions and circumstances.

• Airborne Transmission - Airborne transmission has emerged as the primary means of spreading SARS-CoV-2 and become a major concern. It has been recently shown to exceed the widely promoted social distancing guidelines of 2m and can remain viable in the air for longer periods of time than originally suspected. The fundamental act of human respiration serves as a continous source of infection, requiring continuous compliance with some means of mitigation. Isolation, social distancing and masks work, but with an uneven results and a severe impact on business as usual.

• Rapid Deployment - A quicker response for -any- method can only help reduce the impact. Vaccines are all over the headlines but take billions of dollars and years to develop with clear regulatory requirements for human innoculation. Massive efforts are being made to accelerate development and testing for safety with encouraging results and the proactive stockpiling of the more promising candidates. We have yet to see one actually approved and deployed.

  Mutations seem to be occuring at a lower rate when compared to influenza which should preserve the efficacy of any vaccine developed. The faster a virus can be contained reduces the potential for it to evolve into something more difficult to eradicate. The experts continue to warn us we still don’t know everything there is to know about SARS-CoV-2.

  Isolation can work, but it putting it into practice has had its challenges given the number of cases and continues to make headlines with uneven and contentious compliance.

• Proactive Inactivation - A proactive means of destroying the virus has considerable attractiveness given the gaps and concerns with existing efforts. Chemicals and hand sanitizers work but only on surfaces and require continuous application. They are not effective against airborne transmission. None of the other methods are proven to be 100% effective including vaccines, and all are 'defensive measures' and dependent on general population compliance.

• Site Mitigation - Establishing virus-free zones for public transportation and gathering places would have considerable benefit in returning to business as usual. Tracking, testing, and/or certification (i.e "health passports") have all been suggested to create at least the illusion of security. However, effectiveness remains somewhat speculative given the novelty of the virus and the lack of consistent and robust testing protocols.

  A proactive means of mitigating the virus in a controlled area would reduce the dependency on individual compliance. Effectiveness for indirect methods (i.e. recirculated air) would be determined by environmental factors. Direct mitigation of the virus would be dependent on human safe levels of exposure.

  Other factors which could add value are the ability for sustained mitigation and cost (= availability). Two of the additional technologies were further reviewed for the potential to address these factors.