The Omicron variant battle is in full swing right now, and one tech company in Alberta, Canada looks to bring some new tech to help control its spread.
The aforementioned tech, according to Global News Canada, is an air decontamination device called the HydroxylizAire. Designed to attach to a furnace in a typical home, it circulates air through a chamber where it would be heated by a 50C jamp and exposed to UVC radiation.
With this process, the machine looks to create a chemical reaction that cleans the air by destroying pathogens instead of just containing them.
The company who made the machine is called Ti-DOX. Company president Dean Neitz touts their device’s capabilities, saying that it will be purifying air using a “natural process.”
Neitz also hopes that their technology will help improve overall air quality inside buildings on a continuous basis.
Ti-DOX says that the idea of the machine was actually born a decade ago, but is only now coming to light. It was built with the purpose of purifying indoor air which they claim has up to five times the contaminants as outdoor air.
Despite all this, however, the machine hasn’t actually been tested against COVID-19-let alone the Omicron variant that’s currently wreaking havoc around the world.
However, ER physician Dr. Joe Vipond from the University of Calgary believes that recognizing the importance of air purification is more urgent than ever, given that the pandemic has been “airborne from the beginning,” as per the original Global News report.
The Omicron coronavirus variant is now making the headlines after Delta, and it is pushing world leaders-even Big Tech billionaire Bill Gates-to concentrate their efforts on containing its spread and promoting the use of vaccines.
Omicron Variant: What You Should Know
If there’s one thing you should know about Omicron, it’s that it spreads way faster than almost any other COVID-19 variant before it. It has also been observed to be “highly transmissible” even among fully vaccinated adults, according to NPR.org.
It is this situation that has scientists and health experts from all over the world scrambling to find answers. But while they work tirelessly behind the scenes, the variant is working on its own, with its inner workings so far unknown due to a lack of data, according to the CDC.
There are, however, a few guesses as to why Omicron seems to spread so quickly. As shown by data from HKUMed (via the University of Hong Kong), it seems to multiply an insane 70 times faster inside the human respiratory tract compared to Delta, in as little as 48 hours after infection.
But generally, these researchers did find out that Omicron is roughly four times more infectious than the OG coronavirus, and around twice as infectious as Delta ever was, reports NPR.org.
Furthermore, Omicron has also been found to be more airborne, reports CTV News Calgary-hence, the Ti-DOX air purifying device.