South Korea is fighting COVID-19 with an innovative “virus buster filter” that can kill the virus as soon as the air conditioner starts to work.

COVID-19 spreads with talking, coughing, sneezing as far as 1-8 meters, depending on the size of the droplets. It can also stay floating in the air for minutes. Air conditioning therefore presents a promising approach to tackling to the virus. Conventional AC units could easily spread germs. But introducing a filter with copper ions can kill them.

The filter was tested at Nara University in Japan, where it killed 99.64% of the virus in 5 minutes, and at the University of Colorado in the United States, where it killed 99.37% in 10 minutes.

Destroying viruses before we have time to breathe them in will be part of preventing viral outbreaks in closed spaces in the future