New York City shuttered its subway trains at night and tested powerful ultraviolet lamps to disinfect seats, poles, and floors to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Experts are now evaluating whether these unprecedented and costly steps are beneficial in slowing down the growth of the virus.
The cleanup measures produced something travelers haven’t seen in a long time, or possibly never: Thousands of freshly washed cars that look, feel, and even smell clean.
According to experts, all that cleaning reduces the threat of contracting the virus, but the benefits are limited.
The virus is transmitted predominantly through airborne droplets: it is “everywhere and could not be anywhere,” Robyn Gershon, a clinical professor of epidemiology at New York University, told The Associated Press.
Cleaning a train car in a maintenance yard at night, or even multiple times during the day, as the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority does, may not assist the transit employee or passenger trapped in closed spaces with a person. who coughs.
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Wearing a face mask “will protect us more, having that control between us,” said Gershon. “I think the rest is really more of an illusion, and that’s no small feat because it plays on our psyches.”
Patrick Warren, the MTA’s chief of security, said the authority’s aggressive cleaning and disinfection began at a time when health officials warned that the virus could easily be transmitted from hard surfaces, an orientation that has since evolved to put more emphasis on air transmission.
“As science goes, what we are doing goes,” Warren said.
New York’s subway system typically serves more than 5 million passengers a day, but the number of passengers fell more than 90 percent at the height of the pandemic. Combined with falling revenues at its bridges and toll tunnels, the MTA has projected that the pandemic will cost the agency more than $ 10 billion through next year. The cleanup program will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, officials said in the spring.
The price is worth it? A survey of 1,000 public transit passengers by New York-based advocacy group Tri-State Transportation Campaign found that the cleanup topped a list of actions people wanted before they felt comfortable riding public transit again. .
“But to what extent are we spending too much or deviating too much in the security theater?” Executive Director Nick Sifuentes asked recently.
Dr. David Brenner, director of the Radiation Research Center at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, has assisted the MTA in its UV light pilot program. He called cleaning “not an ideal solution, but it is a solution that is available.”
“I think it increases public safety because instead of having a continuous accumulation of the virus, it will go back to zero every day,” Brenner told the AP. “A much better solution would be if you could continually decontaminate the air throughout the day.”
That is still a possibility. Two studies, one from 2018 and one from this month, concluded that low levels of a certain type of ultraviolet light, known as far ultraviolet light, can continuously circulate in an enclosed space and kill some forms of human coronavirus as effectively as conventionally. Ultraviolet light.
Far-UVC light could offer a whole new level of protection for passengers and transit employees, if it is also found to be effective against the virus that causes COVID-19.
The MTA is already testing a different form of UV light to disinfect subway cars, but it can only be done in station yards when the cars are out of service due to the harmful effect on humans. The limited pilot program costs about $ 1 million.
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Associated Press contributed to this report.
