[heraclius1729]

UV light is also pretty bad for humans, is it not? Sunburn, skin-cancer, and all that. I seem to recall a recent mistake where some UV disinfectant lights were used at an event, resulting in sunburns and eye problems for many attendees.

The article does address this and is talking about a variety of techniques for UV light that has less exposure to people and doesn't result in immediate harm. But presumably this would still be more exposure than sunlight (otherwise, the sun would be killing all these bacteria/viruses anyway), and I'm not aware of any studies assessing the risk of long-term exposure to those levels of UV. If you want to install these systems in buildings, you'd need to assess the risk of literally years of continuous exposure to deem it safe. The couple of weeks on an oil rig proposed in the article wouldn't cut it, from a safety point of view.

But perhaps I'm just being overly conservative.

[tempestn]

As described in the article, far UV does not appear to be directly dangerous to humans at all. However it does produce Ozone, which can be dangerous - the question is how significant that would be in real, world settings, which is being studied.

[EasyMark]

Study it all they want, I really don't want to be under artificial UV in an office setting for 8-10 hours a day. Especially since the germs will eventually become immune to it under such persistent steady evolutionary stress. We have enough cancer contributing technologies in our life already without adding more ozone and UV.

[heraclius1729]

Right, but just because it doesn't appear to be dangerous doesn't mean it won't be in the long term. Unless there've been studies already done on the effects of long term exposure, I'm inclined to be cautious. Things like this can have long term effects that aren't immediately apparent.

[marcosdumay]

Well, if people are talking about COVID and similar diseases, the Sun is killing all the virus.

Also, disinfecting shoes and surfaces is mostly useless.

Anyway, good thing those lamps are expensive, because people will certainly do lots of stupid things with them.