Opposites attract and likes repel. And that’s the physical principle Wichita is deploying in its efforts to try to control the spread of the coronavirus COVID-19.
The city has begun a program of “electrostatic spraying” at Eisenhower National Airport and the Century II Convention and Performing Arts Center, which handle some of the city’s biggest crowds.
Essentially, workers use special equipment to spray an electrically charged disinfecting solution into the air.
The tiny droplets of disinfectant are given a negative charge, which causes them to spread out from each other and to be attracted to walls and other surfaces, which carry a positive charge, said Ben Nelson, senior utilities optimization manager.
It’s kind of like the old elementary-school experiment of rubbing a balloon on your hair to build up a static charge and then watching the balloon stick to a wall.
“It allows us to cover large surfaces with a disinfecting agent much more rapidly than we could do with just simple hand-wiping,” Nelson said. “It helps to quickly disinfect a large area.”
One common method of transmission of COVID-19 is that infected individuals cough or sneeze into their hand and then touch surfaces, leaving a viral smear behind, said Sedgwick County Health Director Adrienne Byrne.
It is not known conclusively how long the virus can live on surfaces. It could be anywhere “from several hours to several days,” Byrne said.
The electrostatic spraying is part of a general ramping-up of the cleaning of city facilities. Most of that cleaning, such as daily disinfection of city buses, is being done the old-fashioned way with hand-spraying and wiping.
Nelson said the airport and Century II were chosen for electrostatic spraying because of their heavy traffic.
Officials hope to expand the program to include City Hall and other municipal buildings, such as recreation centers. But the equipment is in high demand because a lot of other institutional users want it too, Nelson said.
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